An approach to determine inverse relations of basic cardinal direction relations

The spatial relation reasoning is an important branch of spatial knowledge processing. The inverse relation of cardinal direction relation is an important tool for spatial direction reasoning. However, present determine all the inverse relations of the cardinal direction relation. Based on the minimum bounding rectangle (short for MBR), a quadruple model of cardinal direction relation is proposed. Then we analyze the constraints between cardinal direction relations and their inverse relations which are represented by the quadruple model. Finally, a novel method is put forward for determining the inverse relation of any cardinal direction relation.