There are plenty of places like home: Using relational representations in hierarchies for distance-based image understanding

Understanding images in terms of logical and hierarchical structures is crucial for many semantic tasks, including image retrieval, scene understanding and robotic vision. This paper combines robust feature extraction, qualitative spatial relations, relational instance-based learning and compositional hierarchies in one framework. For each layer in the hierarchy, qualitative spatial structures in images are detected, classified and then employed one layer up the hierarchy to obtain higher-level semantic structures. We apply a four-layer hierarchy to street view images and subsequently detect corners, windows, doors, and individual houses.