Interactive navigation of image collections

Abstract

Image databases are growing at a rapid rate and hence efficient and effective techniques to manage these vast repositories are highly sought after. Image database navigation systems provide an interesting alternative to retrieval based approaches, and in this paper we show how image browsers can be used for interactive exploration of large image collections based on the principle that visually similar images are located close to each other thus helping user navigation, and that large datasets are handled through a hierarchical approach. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.