Image Mining for the Construction of Semantic-Inference Rules and for the Development of Automatic Image Diagnosis Systems

Abstract

This chapter introduces image mining as a method to discover implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information from digital image and video repositories. It argues that image mining is a special discipline because of the special type of data and therefore, image-mining methods that consider the special data representation and the different aspects of image mining have to be developed. Furthermore, a bridge has to be established between image mining and image processing, feature extraction and image understanding since the later topics are concerned with the development of methods for the automatic extraction of higher-level image representations. We introduce our methodology, the developed methods and the system for image mining which we successfully applied to several medical image-diagnostic tasks.