Knowledge Driven Image Mining with Mixture Density Mercer Kernals

This paper presents a new methodology for automatic knowledge driven image mining based on the theory of Mercer Kernels, which are highly nonlinear symmetric positive definite mappings from the original image space to a very high, possibly infinite dimensional feature space. In that high dimensional feature space, linear clustering, prediction, and classification algorithms can be applied and the results can be mapped back down to the original image space. Thus, highly nonlinear structure in the image can be recovered through the use of well-known linear mathematics in the feature space. This process has a number of advantages over traditional methods in that it allows for nonlinear interactions to be modelled with only a marginal increase in computational costs. In this paper we present the theory of Mercer Kernels; describe its use in image mining, discuss a new method to generate Mercer Kernels directly from data, and compare the results with existing algorithms on data from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Spectral Radiometer) instrument taken over the Arctic region. We also discuss the potential application of these methods on the Intelligent Archive, a NASA initiative for developing a tagged image data warehouse for the Earth Sciences.