PD Dr.-Ing. habil. Björn Gottfried

My research is about the analysis of spatial patterns. Among others, this is of interest in vision and in spatiotemporal reasoning. Concerning the former my focus lies on shape analysis methods, concerning the latter I am investigating motion patterns.

From the methodological point of view I am devoted to the school of qualitative spatial representations. I am investigating how far one gets when describing spatial patterns as compact as possible.

Spatial patterns can in particular be analysed using the notion of positional-contrast. The idea is to decompose objects into parts and to describe the resulting patterns by positional relations. Then, two objects are distinguished by their differences in positional relations: they show a high positional-contrast. But similar objects decompose into similiar patterns, and consequently, show a low positional-contrast. One set of positional relations is shown in the following.