A system, method and search engine for searching images for data contained therein.
Training images are provided and image attributes are extracted from the training
images. Attributes extracted from training images include image features characteristic
of a particular numerically generated image type, such as horizontal lines, vertical
lines, percentage white area, circular arcs and text. Then, the training images
are classified according to extracted attributes and a particular classifier is
selected for each group of training images. Classifiers can include classification
trees, discriminant functions, regression trees, support vector machines, neural
nets and hidden Markov models. Available images are collected from remotely connected
computers, e.g., over the Internet. Collected images are indexed and provided for
interrogation by users. As a user enters queries, indexed images are identified
and returned to the user. The user may provide additional data as supplemental
data to the extracted image data. A chart, representative of the supplemented data,
may be generated and provided to the user in response to a particular query.