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 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 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
prototypes (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
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Applications of computer vision
Image search