601
AN INTERACTIVE IMAGE INDEX
William F. Eddy, Audris Mockus
Abstract:
We are studying a large collection of digital images having nearly
30,000 members. We regard each image in the collection as an
individual observation. To facilitate our study we construct an index
of the images in the collection. The index utilizes a small copy of
each image (a ``thumbnail'') to represent the full-size version. A
large number of these thumbnails are laid out in a workstation
window. We can interactively arrange and rearrange the thumbnails within
the window. For example, we can sort the thumbnails by the values of
a function computed from them or by the values of data associated with
each of them. By the use of specialized equipment (a single-frame
video disk recorder/player), we can instantaneously access any individual
full-size image in the collection as a video image. We
regard our software as the beginning of the development of exploratory
tools for studying collections of images as we routinely study batches
of numbers. Our focus to date has been on developing a tool that will
assist in selecting individual images for inspection. We anticipate
that in the future we may wish to consider summary information and
distributional properties of various aspects of the images. The talk
included a videotape of our system in use.
Keywords: Exploratory Data Analysis, Image Database
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