Two approaches for integrating images into the framework of a database management system are presented. The classi cation approach preprocesses all images and attaches a semantic classi cation and an associated certainty factor to ect found in the image. The abstraction approach describes each object in the image by using a vector consisting of the values of some of its features e.g., shape, genus, etc.. The approaches di er in the way in which responses to queries that are based on image content are computed. In the classi cation approach, images are retrieved on the basis of whether hey contain objects that have the same classi cation as query objects. In the abstraction approach, retrieval is on the basis of similarity of feature vector values of these objects. Both the pattern recognition and indexing aspects of the method are addressed for each approach. The emphasis is on extracting both contextual and spatial information from the raw images. Methods for storing and indexing sym...