Interactive browsing of image repositories (invited paper)

Abstract

Image collections, both personal and commercial, are growing very rapidly. Consequently, methods for managing large image databases are highly sought after. In this paper, we look at various ways to visualise and interactively browse image collections. In general, we can divide image database visualisation approaches into three categories: mapping-based techniques which typically employ dimensionality reduction algorithms, clustered visualisations which group, often in a hierarchical manner, similar images, and graph-based approaches where links between images are exploited to arrive at an intuitive display of the dataset. Once displayed, the user should be able to browse through the collection in an interactive, intuitive and efficient manner. Such browsing can be achieved in several ways. Horizontal browsing navigates through images of the same visualisation plane, and includes operations such as panning, zooming, magnification and scaling. In contrast, vertical browsing allows navigation to a different level of a hierarchically organised visualisation. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.