Picture indexing and abstraction techniques for pictorial databases.

We present an approach for picture indexing and abstraction. Picture indexing facilitates information retrieval from a pictorial database consisting of picture objects and picture relations. To construct picture indexes, abstraction operations to perform picture object clustering and classification are formulated. To substantiate the abstraction operations, we also formalize syntactic abstraction rules and semantic abstraction rules. We then illustrate by examples how to apply these abstraction operations to obtain various picture indexes, and how to construct icons to facilitate accessing of pictorial data.