Despite being a young field of research and development, data mining has proved to be a successful approach to extracting knowledge from huge collections of structured digital data collection as usually stored in databases. Whereas data mining was done in early days primarily on numerical data, nowadays multimedia and Internet applications drive the need to develop data mining methods and techniques that can work on all kinds of data such as documents, images, and signals.

This book introduces the basic concepts of mining multimedia data and demonstrates how to apply these methods in various application fields. It is written for students, ambitioned professionals from industry and medicine, and for scientists who want to contribute R&D work to the field or apply this new technology.