2. System Architecture
The functionality of an information mining system, in general, is based upon a chain of
operations consisting of image collection, processing, indexing and query supported by a database
management system (DBMS), and the use of the discovered information for some decisionmaking
process. Ref. [4] distinguishes between two kinds of frameworks characterizing image
information mining systems: function-driven framework and information-driven framework. We
follow the function-driven framework since it is application-oriented and relatively easy to
implement according to the module functionality. Fig. 1 shows the schematic diagram of the
mining prototype system, which consists of three major components: image processing module,
databases module, and graphical user interface (GUI).