Image collection exploration is a mechanism to explore large digital image repositories. The huge amount of digital images produced every day through different devices such as

mobile phones A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...

bring forth challenges for the storage, indexing and access to these repositories.

Content-based image retrieval Content-based image retrieval, also known as query by image content ( QBIC) and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR), is the application of computer vision techniques to the image retrieval problem, that is, the problem of searching ...

(CBIR) has been the traditional

paradigm In science and philosophy, a paradigm () is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. Etymology ''Paradigm'' comes f ...

to index and retrieve images. However, this paradigm suffers of the well known semantic gap problem. Image collection exploration consists of a set of computational methods to represent, summarize, visualize and navigate image repositories in an efficient, effective and intuitive way.

Summarization

Automatic summarization Automatic summarization is the process of shortening a set of data computationally, to create a subset (a summary) that represents the most important or relevant information within the original content. Artificial intelligence algorithms are commo ...

consists in finding a set of images from a larger image collection that represents such collection. Different methods based on clustering have been proposed to select these image

prototype A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and Software prototyping, software programming. A prototyp ...

s (summary). The summarization process addresses the problem of selecting a representative set of images of a search query or in some cases, the overview of an image collection.

Visualization

Image collection visualization is the process of visualize a set of images using a visualization metaphor, in which an image similarity function is used to represent image relations in a visualization layout.

Information visualization Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random, ...

is an active area that investigates new ways to visualize information by using visualization metaphors. Particularly, new ways of visualizing image collections are being investigated, which propose conventional and unconventional visualization metaphors. If the images are sorted according to their similarities, a hierarchic image browsing approach similar to cartographic services such as Google Maps can be used. picsbuffet is an online demo of such an approach.

Interaction

Image collection interaction consists in offering users mechanisms to feedback image search systems. In this interaction process, the system learns from user feedback to retrieve results more precise and relevant to the user.

References

{{reflist Applications of computer vision Image search