1. Image Retrieval
Content-based image retrieval is used for retrieving historical
patterns similar to those that users are interested in. The motivation
for retrieving similar patterns archived in the database is that past
instances of typhoons give some information on the analysis of the
current instance. If we could perform an "instance-based prediction"
based on past similar patterns, it would be interesting; howver, this
kind of prediction has received very pessimistic outlook in the
meteorology community. The reason for this is the chaotic nature of
the atmosphere. However, the representation of typhoon shape, and the
definition of similarity between typhoon shape has still much to be
investigated.
2. System Architecture
We are building IMET (Image Mining Environment for Typhoon
analysis and prediction), which is designed for the intelligent
and efficient searching and browsing of the typhoon image collection.
The figure illustrates the overall architecture of IMET. The system
consists of three main components: Web browser clients as the user
interface, the Web servers which may act as hierarchical meta servers,
and backend database servers where typhoon data are actually
archived. Moreover, those components may be distributed over the
network to allow distributed database systems, which is often the case
with satellite data archives. At the moment, we have two types of
backend database servers, namely relational database management
systems (RDBMS) and our hand-crafted image search engine called FSE
(Feature Space Explorer).
For this architecture, we need to prepare two types of languages ---
namely, a query language and a defition language. For our
hand-crafted image database engine, we are also creating our own query
language, which relies on XML for the syntax of the language, and also
relies on XQuery (Query Language for XML), or its full XML-encoded
XQueryX (XML Syntax for XQuery), and other XML-related standards for
the semantics of the language. The advantage of having such
hand-crafted languages is in rapid prototyping of new tasks required
for typhoon data mining. Our intention is not in developing
full-fledged languages with rigorous theoretical foundations.
Instead, the design goal of our languages is to create a handy yet
useful languages with maximally orthogonalized operators whose
combination describe various actions needed in IMET.
3. Demonstration