4. The computer-implemented method of claim 2 , wherein the approximations of the candidate objects are minimum bounding rectangles of the geometric shapes corresponding to the candidate objects.
4. The computer-implemented method of claim 2 , wherein the approximations of the candidate objects are minimum bounding rectangles of the geometric shapes corresponding to the candidate objects. 5. The computer-implemented method of claim 4 , wherein said determining if the filtered candidate objects satisfy the query includes comparing the geometric shapes corresponding to the filtered candidate objects with a query area specified in the query.