Image Mining: A New Approach for Data Mining

Abstract

We introduce a new focus for data mining, which is concerned with knowledge discovery in image databases. We expect all aspects of data mining to be relevant to image mining but in this first work we concentrate on the problem of finding associations. To that end, we present a data mining algorithm to find association rules in 2-dimensional color images. The algorithm has four major steps: feature extraction, object identification, auxiliary image creation and object mining. Our algorithm is general in that it does not rely on any type of domain knowledge. A synthetic image set containing geometric shapes was generated to test our initial algorithm implementation. Our experimental results show that image mining is feasible. We also suggest several directions for future work in this area.