Manually generated representative image thumbnails

How would you best represent a high resolution original image given a fixed number of pixels for an image thumbnail? Is it possible to create better thumbnails than the standard computer-generated thumbnails that apply filtering and subsampling? In this report, these questions are addressed by manually generating thumbnails that attempt to well-represent the original high resolution images. Thumbnails are generated for several example images that contain high spatial frequency image textures that are difficult to represent using standard thumbnails. For each example image, we discuss: 1) the reasons the image was selected; 2) the manual steps used to generate the representative thumbnail; and 3) our informal observations about the results and the comparisons between the manual and standard thumbnails. Common themes distilled from these examples may serve as guidelines for developing automatic algorithms for generating improved thumbnails.