Visual structures for image browsing

ABSTRACT

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) presents several challenges and has been subject to extensive research from many domains, such as image processing or database systems. Database researchers are concerned with indexing and querying, whereas image processing experts worry about extracting appropriate image descriptors. Comparatively little work has been done on designing user interfaces for CBIR systems. This, in turn, has a profound effect on these systems since the concept of image similarity is strongly influenced by user perception. This paper describes an initial effort to fill this gap, combining recent research in CBIR and Information Visualization, studied from a Human-Computer Interface perspective. It presents two visualization techniques based on Spiral and Concentric Rings implemented in a CBIR system to explore query results. The approach is centered on keeping user focus on both the query image, and the most similar retrieved images. Experiments conducted so far suggest that the proposed visualization strategies improves system usability.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction paradigms

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval

    • Evaluation of retrieval results

      • Relevance assessment

    • Information retrieval query processing

  • Information systems applications

    • Multimedia information systems

      • Multimedia databases