In this paper, we propose a unified framework, called Markov Model Mediator (MMM), to facilitate image database clustering and to improve the query performance. The structure of the MMM framework consists of two hierarchical levels: local MMMs and integrated MMMs, which model the affinity relations among the images within a single image database and within a set of image databases, respectively, via an effective data mining process. The effectiveness and efficiency of the MMM framework for database clustering and image retrieval are demonstrated over a set of image databases which contain various numbers of images with different dimensions and concept categories.
