The CRIM Image Mining Environment (CIME) is an image understanding environment integrated with knowledge engineering technologies. The image understanding technology developed for CIME supports recognition tasks such as symbol recognition, contour line recognition, and general image processing operations. CIME is composed of an Object Model Description Language (OMDL) which allows for the semantic description of knowledge about objects and their context, an inference engine which performs image understanding based on the model descriptions in OMDL to achieve the recognition of complex objects, and a task builder which allows for the acquisition of image understanding knowledge and helps the application designer to build strategies for solving application problems through knowledge reuse.