Patent ID: 8457441

Claim:
A method of determining and extracting an overlap between spatial regions comprising: creating a first vector multi-key (VMK) representing a first spatial region; creating a first compressed VMK by compressing the first VMK wherein compressing the first VMK comprises: building a matrix of VMK entries representing binary vectors, checking adjacent entries of the matrix for a common ancestor where a common ancestor is the deepest point in the array which the two adjacent entries share, and merging two vectors when a neighboring entry vector is the same length as a chosen vector and a common ancestor depth is one less than a depth of the chosen vector; creating a second VMK representing a second spatial region; performing an ordered comparison of the first and second VMKs using a first binary tree for the first VMK and a second binary tree for the second VMK comprising: comparing binary list values of the first VMK derived from the first binary tree and the second VMK derived from the secondary binary tree; and alternating between the first and second VMKs when a search value of one of the first or the second VMK passes a target value in the other of the first or second VMK; and storing overlapping terms from the ordered comparison, the overlapping terms representing a spatial overlap region between the first and second spatial regions.