Patent ID: 8666164

Claim:
A system for modeling a region segmented image, the system comprising: a processor readable storage medium in operable communication with a processor, the processor readable storage medium containing one or more programming instructions; a computer model that models the region segmented image, the computer model stored as a data structure on the processor readable storage medium, the computer model capable of being accessed and read by a computer program and comprising: one or more nodes, wherein: each node in the one or more nodes represents an arbitrarily shaped region present in the region segmented image; and each of the arbitrarily shaped regions comprise an image segment, wherein the image segment is an indivisible partition in the region segmented image; one or more logical nodes, wherein each logical node represents an image region formed by the union of two or more arbitrarily shaped image regions in the region segmented image that exhibit at least one type of spatial relationship selected from a hierarchical spatial relationship and an adjacent spatial relationship; and a hierarchical graph representation of the region segmented image, the hierarchical graph representation comprising each of the one or more nodes and each of the one or more logical nodes, wherein each of the one or more nodes and each of the one or more logical nodes is a vertex in the hierarchical graph, and the characteristic spatial relationship between each of the one or more nodes and connecting nodes form connecting edges between vertices.