3D Spatial Pattern Matching

2026-06-24

AI Summary

Existing spatial pattern matching methods are largely confined to two-dimensional space and struggle to handle three-dimensional entity matching involving elevation or height information in real-world scenarios. This work extends spatial pattern matching to 3D environments for the first time, introducing a general problem formulation and proposing a subgraph-matching-based algorithm that explicitly models distance relationships in three-dimensional space. To support empirical evaluation, the authors construct the first 3D spatial pattern matching dataset, integrating both synthetic data and real-world building structures from the city of Hamburg. Experimental results on this benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, establishing a foundational algorithmic framework and experimental platform for future research in 3D spatial pattern analysis.

Abstract

Spatial pattern matching is the process of matching query entities and constraints with database entities and relations. It has many applications, including similar region search, housing market search, landmark search, and road network matching. To our knowledge, all existing spatial pattern matching approaches frame the problem in a 2 dimensional space, where entities lie in a cartesian plane and relationships defined between them are contained in 2 dimensions. However, this problem framing has significant limitations when searching for real world entities that have height in addition to position. To address this limitation, we extend spatial pattern matching to 3 dimensions and provide a generalized definition of the problem. We describe a subgraph matching algorithm capable of resolving 3D spatial patterns over distance relations and release two 3D spatial pattern matching datasets, one synthetic and one containing real 3D building data from the city of Hamburg, Germany. We test our subgraph matching algorithm on both datasets and present results as a baseline for future methods to build upon.

Problem

• 3D spatial pattern matching
• spatial pattern matching
• 3D data
• subgraph matching
• spatial relationships

Innovation

• 3D spatial pattern matching
• subgraph matching
• distance relations
• spatial databases
• 3D urban modeling