Interactive Visualization Tool for Analysis of Large Image Databases

Navigation and interaction are essential features for an interface that is built as a help tool for analyzing large image databases. A tool for actively searching for information in large image databases is called an Image Retrieval System, or its more advanced version is called an Adaptive Image Retrieval System (AIRS). In an Adaptive Image Retrieval System (AIRS) the user-system interaction is built through an interface that allows the relevance feedback process to take place. In this chapter, the author identifies two types of users for an AIRS: a user who seeks images whom the author refers to as an end-user, and a user who designs and researches the collection and the retrieval systems whom the author refers to as a researcher-user. In this context, she describes a new interactive multiple views interface for an AIRS (Doloc-Mihu, 2007), in which each view illustrates the relationships between the images from the collection by using visual attributes (colors, shapes, proximities). With such views, the interface allows the user (both end-user and researcher-user) a more effective interaction with the system, which, further, helps during the analysis of the image collection. The author’s qualitative evaluation of these multiple views in AIRS shows that each view has its own limitations and benefits. However, together, the views offer complementary information that helps the user in improving his or her search effectiveness.