Similarity Measurement of Multi-holed Regions Using Constraint Satisfaction Problem

Multi-holed plane object, as one of the abstracts of the real world, mainly represent geographic objects having more than one interior boundary, such as areas that contain a few lakes, or lakes with islands. To realize the matching between these spatial objects, the paper proposed a model of similarity measurement on multi-holed regions, with several restrictions being taken into account. In this model, the multi-holed plane object was viewed as a micro-spatial-scene, where holes and direction between holes playing roles of spatial objects and spatial distribution relations respectively. Taking into the direction between holes and the shape of holes account, Fourier descriptor was utilized to describe the shape of holes and Feature Matrix of direction was applied to represent the distribution relationship between holes, then the process of measuring similarity would be transformed into a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). Association graph containing nodes and edges could be adopted to represent the matching solutions of CSP. In the paper, A case study of Urmia, a lake in Iran, is given to illustrate the whole process of similarity measurement among the shapes of the lake in different years, and the result of experiment is presented to be simple and applicable.