On Graph Extraction from Image Data

Hot topics in knowledge discovery and interactive data mining from natural images include the application of topological methods and machine learning algorithms. For any such approach one needs at first a relevant and robust digital content representation from the image data. However, traditional pixel-based image analysis techniques do not effectively extract, hence represent the content. A very promising approach is to extract graphs from images, which is not an easy task. In this paper we present a novel approach for knowledge discovery by extracting graph structures from natural image data. For this purpose, we created a framework built upon modern Web technologies, utilizing HTML canvas and pure Javascript inside a Web-browser, which is a very promising engineering approach. Following on a short description of some popular image classification and segmentation methodologies, we outline a specific data processing pipeline suitable for carrying out future scientific research. A demonstration of our implementation, compared to the results of a traditional watershed transformation performed in Matlab showed very promising results in both quality and runtime, despite
some open problems. Finally, we provide a short discussion of a few open problems and outline some of our future research routes