Architecture concept for Earth Observation data mining system

The increasing number of Earth Observation image acquisitions provides huge volume of information, which requires new techniques, methods and tools to explore and exploit the abundant volume of information contained in the image archives. This paper presents an architecture concept for data mining systems using Earth Observation images. The architecture concept is defined as a modular system composed of five modules allowing functions such as primitive feature extraction, image content and context analyses, finding scenes of interest by content, enriched metadata, and semantics, the interpretation and understanding of the image content, semantic definition of the image content, and visualization of the image database via human machine interfaces. All these functionalities are integrated and supported by a database management system.