Image Mining Techniques and Applications

Digitization in every sector leads to the growth of digital data in a tremendous amount. Digital data are not only available in the form of text but it is also available in the form of images, audio and video. Decision making people in every field like business, public sector, hospital, etc. are trying to get useful and implicit information from the already existing digital data bases. Image mining is the concept used to extract implicit and useful data from images stored in the large data bases. Image mining is used in variety of fields like medical diagnosis, space research, remote sensing, agriculture, industries and even in the educational field. Valuable information can be hidden in images. The need for image mining is high in view of the fast growing amounts of image data. In this paper, we first point out unique characteristics of image mining, then analyze the overall process and discuss the main technology of image mining, namely, image classification and clustering, association rule mining. Some applications in various areas are introduced. Finally, some future research directions and problems of image mining are presented.