Probabilistic composition of cone-based cardinal direction relations

Composition tables play a significant role in qualitative spatial reasoning (QSR). At present,a couple of composition tables focusing on various spatial relations have been developed in a qualitative approach. However,the spatial reasoning proc-esses are usually not purely qualitative in everyday life,where probability is one important issue that should be considered. In this paper,the probabilistic compo-sitions of cone-based cardinal direction relations (CDR) are discussed and esti-mated by making some assumptions. Consequently,the form of composition result turns to be {(R1,P1),(R2,P2),…,(Rn,Pn)},where Pi is the probability associated with relation Ri. Employing the area integral method,the probabilities in each composi-tion case can be computed with the assumption that the target object is uniformly distributed in the corresponding cone regions.