In this paper, we demonstrate the concepts of a prototype of a knowledge-driven content-based information mining system produced to manage and explore large volumes of remote sensing image data. The system consists of a computationally intensive offline part and an online interface. The offline part aims at the extraction of primitive image features, their compression, and data reduction, the generation of a completely unsupervised image content-index, and the ingestion of the catalogue entry in the database management system. Then, the user's interests-semantic interpretations of the image content-are linked with Bayesian networks to the content-index. Since this calculation is only based on a few training samples, the link can be computed online, and the complete image archive can be searched for images that contain the defined cover type. Practical applications exemplified with different remote sensing datasets show the potential of the system. Index Terms-Content-based image retrieval (CBIR), image information mining, information extraction, statistical learning.

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has been a Scientist with the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, Wessling, Germany. He is developing algorithms for model-based information retrieval from high-complexity signals and methods for scene understanding from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and interferometric SAR data. He is engaged in research related to information theoretical aspects and semantic representations in advanced communication systems. Currently, he is Senior Scientist and Image Analysis Research Group Leader with the Remote Sensing Technology Institute of DLR, Oberpfaffenhofen, the Coordinator of the CNES/DLR/ENST Competence Centre on Information Extraction and Image Understanding for Earth Observation, and Professor with the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications Paris. His interests are in Bayesian inference, information and complexity theory, stochastic processes, model-based scene understanding image semantic coding, image information mining for applications in information retrieval and understanding of high-resolution SAR, and optical observations. He has held Visiting Professor appointments from 1991 to 1992 with the

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