Plenary Speech III: Interactive exploration of large image collections

Abstract:
Image collections, both private and commercial, are growing rapidly and hence efficient and effective tools to manage these repositories are highly sought after. Content-based approaches, which are based on the principle of visual similarity derived from image features, seem necessary as most images are unannotated. However, typical content-based retrieval systems have shown only limited usefulness.

In my talk, I will present interactive image database browsing systems as an interesting alternative to direct retrieval approaches. Exploiting content-based concepts, large image collections can be visualised based on their mutual visual similarity, while the user is given the possibility of interactively exploring them further through various browsing operations. After introducing the main approaches to visualising and browsing image databases, I will focus on some of the systems that we have developed in our lab for this purpose, in particular the Hue Sphere Image Browser and the Honeycomb Image Browser as well their recent ports to mobile devices.

Speaker:
Dr. Gerald Schaefer

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Department of Computer Science
Loughborough University
Loughborough, LE11 3TU, U.K.