Abstract
The recent revolution of digital camera technology has resulted inmuch larger collections of images. Browsing techniques for imagesthus become increasingly important for overviewing and retrievingimages in sizable collections. This paper proposes CAT (ClusteredAlbum Thumbnail), a technique for browsing large image collections,and its interface for controlling the level of details. This newsystem clusters images according to their keywords and pixel values,and selects head images for each cluster. It then visualizesthe clusters by applying a hierarchical data visualization technique,which represents the hierarchical clusters as nested rectangular regions.Interlocking to the zooming operation, it selectively displayshead images while zooming out, or individual images while zoomingin. We argue that such an operation is friendly for users to exploreand search for specific images from huge image collections,because the users are familiar with the Graphical User Interfaces(GUI) for file systems. The hierarchical organization of images inCAT parallels the organization of files in GUI and also supports explorationin a top-down manner. We provide several examples andpresent thorough evaluation methods for the techniques developed.
