Visualization, Estimation and User-Modeling for Interactive Browsing of Image Libraries

We present a user-centric system for visualization and layout for content-based image retrieval and browsing. Image features (visual and/or semantic) are analyzed to display and group retrievals as thumbnails in a 2-D spatial layout which conveys mutual similarities. Moreover, a novel subspace feature weighting technique is proposed and used to modify 2-D layouts in a variety of context-dependent ways. An efficient computational technique for subspace weighting and re-estimation leads to a simple user-modeling framework whereby the system can learn to display query results based on layout examples (or relevance feedback) provided by the user. The resulting retrieval, browsing and visualization engine can adapt to the user’s (time-varying) notions of content, context and preferences in style of interactive navigation. Monte Carlo simulations with synthetic ”user-layouts” as well as pilot user studies have demonstrated the ability of this framework to accurately model or ”mimic” users by automatically generating layouts according to their preferences. International Conference on Image & Video Retrieval (CIVR’02) London, UK, July 2002 This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright c ©Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc., 2002 201 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 ∗ MERL Research Laboratory † University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Published in: International Conference on Image & Video Retrieval (CIVR’02), July 2002.