SBIR Phase II: Discovery Analyst: A Data Mining System for Image Databases

This Small Business Innovation Research Program Phase II project will develop a highly innovative data mining software tool that is capable of mining imagery and spatial information stored in a database management system (DBMS). Billions of dollars have been spent in converting the world's vast supply of paper maps into digital, geographically referenced, data for geographic information systems (GIS) applications because location matters in almost every instance of decision-making for both government agencies and private sector businesses. The proliferation of relational, spatial, and now visual data from high-resolution satellites, all stored in a common DBMS architecture, offers organizations the opportunity for knowledge discovery in databases; however, the technical challenges of maintaining, navigating, and mining these data are formidable. Current workflow approaches are disjointed and exclusive of image data. The product resulting from this project will allow all of the data to be queried and mined in a holistic workflow approach yielding potential useful discoveries through its primary innovations not presently available in data mining software; 1) Seamless integration of data mining and feature extraction workflows, 2) Mining content of high-resolution earth imagery stored in spatial databases, 3) Cleanup of GIS databases, and 4) Advanced query generation and data mining technology.

Market research confirms that companies are investing in data mining software and high- resolution commercial satellite imagery. The proposed product will have commercial applications in both traditional GIS application areas (forestry, defense, civil government, agriculture) and emerging vertical markets for GIS applications (banking and financial, telecommunications, security, manufacturing, retail and healthcare. There is a powerful demand for the knowledge acquisition vital to all location-based government decision-making processes. This significantly impacts the quality of management in our national security, resource handling, and the quality of our environment.