The fuzzy qualitative evaluation of directional spatial relationships
(such as "to the right of", "to the south of"...) between areal objects
often relies on the computation of a histogram of angles, which is
considered to provide a good representation of the relative position of
an object with regard to another. In this paper, the notion of the
histogram of forces is introduced. It generalizes and may supersede the
histogram of angles. The objects (2-D entities) are handled as
longitudinal sections (1-D entities), not as points (0-D entities). It
is thus possible to fully benefit from the power of integral calculus
and so ensure rapid processing of raster data as well as of vector
data, explicitly considering both angular and metric information.
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