Organizing Multimedia Information with Maps

Semantic multimedia organization is an open challenge. In this chapter, we present an innovative way of automatically organizing multimedia information to facilitate content-based browsing. It is based on self-organizing maps. The visualization capabilities of the self-organizing map provide an intuitive way of representing the distribution of data as well as the object similarities. The main idea is to visualize similar documents spatially close to each other, while the distance between different documents is bigger. We demonstrate this on the particular case of video information. One key concept is the disregard of the temporal aspect during the clustering. We introduce a novel time bar visualization that reprojects the temporal information. The combination of innovative visualization and interaction methods allows efficient exploration of relevant information in multimedia content.