Architecture for Web-Based Image Mining and Management Systems

Abstract

The explosive growth in the volume of images available on the Web and in enterprise databases continues unabated. However, images on the Web are of many variations in type and format. Selecting relevant images based on image content is a difficult problem. Managing a large amount of images using their semantic meaning with content-based retrieval remains a challenge for both database and image processing researchers. This paper contributes by proposing an architecture for Web-based image mining and management systems with content-based image retrieval (CBIR), ImgWeb. ImgWeb is a Web-based system because it not only enables image mining and management for images in the database but also images from the Internet (Web images). Image agents play a key role in retrieving and mining Web images that are relevant to textual queries. ImgWeb is an object-oriented image database system, and it represents images as content-objects for processing. Thus, it supports CBIR and a wide range of graphical and textual querying methods. The proposed architecture permits the development of new image mining and management systems by utilizing existing components. Examples of image database applications include graphic design, recognition and entertainment.

• Image Mining
• Image Management
• Content-object
• Content-based Image Retrieval
• Visual Navigation Engine
• Image Directory
• World Wide Web
• WWW