A metric for comparing relational descriptions

Relational models are frequently used in high-level computer vision. Finding a correspondence between a relational model and an image description is an important operation in the analysis of scenes. In this paper the process of finding the correspondence is formalized by defining a general relational distance measure that computes a numeric distance between any two relational descriptions-a model and an image description, two models, or two image descriptions. The distance measure is proved to be a metric, and is illustrated with examples of distance between object models. A variant measure used in our past studies is shown not to be a metric.