A survey on image data analysis through clustering techniques for real world applications

A huge amount of image data is being collected in real world sectors. Image data analytics provides information about important facts and issues of a particular domain. But, it is challenging to handle voluminous, unstructured and unlabeled image collection. Clustering provides groups of homogeneous unlabeled data. Therefore, it is used quite often to access the interesting data easily and quickly. Image clustering is a process of partitioning image data into clusters on the basis of similarities. Whereas, features extracted from images are used for the computation of similarities among them. In this paper, significant feature extraction approaches and clustering methods applied on the image data from nine important applicative areas are reviewed. Medical, 3D imaging, oceanography, industrial automation, remote sensing, mobile phones, security and traffic control are considered applicative areas. Characteristics of images, suitable clustering approaches for each domain, challenges and future research directions for image clustering are discussed.