images have to be preprocessed. Therefore unneces-
sary or unrelated data is cleaned up and quality reduc-
tions due to noise are eliminated through filtering op-
erations. This step may include image-thresholding,
border-tracing an wavelet-based segmentation.
Feature Extraction: Algorithms are used to detect
features such as shapes, edges or other basic elements
in the images. Therefore the image content is reduced
while unimportant features can easily be discarded. A
promising feature extraction approach can be found in
(P. G. Foschi, 2002), where a combination of the fea-
tures color, edge and texture is suggested.
Image Mining Technology: Image mining tech-
niques are used on the extracted feature vectors to
reveal, evaluate and explain high-level knowledge.
Several methods have been developped which real-
ize this procedure in different ways: Image classifica-
tion, clustering, indexing and retrieval, object recog-
nition, association rule mining and approaches that
work with neural networks.
The techniques are used in many different real-
world applications, like for example the analysis of
paths and trends of forest fires over years in satel-
lite images in order to enable firefighters to fight fire
more effectively (J. Zhang, 2002). Another work
uses images gathered from the Web for learning of
a generic image classification system and enables a
Web image mining approach for generic image clas-
sification (Yanai, 2003). Image mining was intro-
duced by (Ordonez and Omiecinski, 1998) as new ap-
proach for data mining. The fundamental concepts of
discovering knowledge from data stored in relational
databases are transfered to image databases.
Related to this idea and the fact that process min-
ing builds on data mining, also the association of im-
age mining with process mining techniques or rather
the application of image mining in the context of busi-
ness process management is reasonable. However,
the application of image mining techniques or in gen-
eral the integration of images in this field is not yet
fully explored. The work of (Wiedmann, 2017) and
(R. Schmidt, 2016) suggest two different approaches
to introduce images and related mining techniques in
business process management. In the thesis of (Wied-
mann, 2017), the business process modeling language
BPMN is extended to a more intuitive modeling lan-
guage which allows to annotate tasks with multime-
dial content like images or videos. This approach en-
ables to add non-formalized descriptions to a process
task and enriches the process model with additional
information. During the execution of this task, pro-
cess participants can follow the referenced execution
in the video. The work of (R. Schmidt, 2016) con-
firms the potential of image mining for business pro-
cess management. The process management lifecycle
according to (M. Dumas, 2013) is presented and the
application and intregation of images and suitable im-
age mining techniques for each phase are discussed.
This approach focuses on image data which is cre-
ated in each phase. The authors differentiate between
documents, drawings and pictures, while documents
contain textual information and are analyzed with op-
tical character recognition methods. Drawings and
pictures are analyzed by using one of the image min-
ing techniques as described above. Furthermore, the
authors present a protoype for object recognition of
business process models which detects modeling ele-
ments like gateways, activities etc. from images.
Altogether, both authors explain how images con-
tribute to support the overall process. Particulary in-
teresting is the suggestion of (R. Schmidt, 2016) to
analyze pictures, taken with phones or tablets, which
contain information of the production environment.
Covering the process monitoring and controlling step,
these images are analyzed subsequently in order to
find possible process improvements. This proposal
corresponds with our approach, while we share the
idea that any issues that may reduce the overall pro-
cess success could revealed through monitoring the
process execution.
In contrast to the work of (R. Schmidt, 2016), we
suggest a concrete approach that aims to process im-
provement through an overall system that solely bases
on the image data that is produced in the process ex-
ecution step (cf. Section 3). Our system is restricted
to images or videos which contain real information of
the production environment or capture actual states of
a product. We go further by restoring the analyzed im-
provements in the existing process model. For this we
propose to translate them in the considered process
modeling language or to use media annotations like
suggested by (Wiedmann, 2017). Compared to clas-
sical machine vision approaches that control the qual-
ity of a product like (Manigel and Leonhard, 1992),
(H. Paulo, 2002) or (E. Saldana, 2013), our concept
starts one stage earlier and identifies the causes of de-
fects in products if they are related to human task ex-
ecutions. However, such systems can easily be inte-
grated in our overall concept while the implemented
techniques can be used in the image analysis step of
our concept.
3 CONCEPTUAL APPROACH
We illustrate our conceptual approach by a running
example. In this example, a certain product has to be
manufactured according to a process model PM. We
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