iWebImage: Enabling real-time interactive access to web images

Images are widely used in web pages. However, most web images can only be viewed passively. Currently, it remains inconvenient for users to collect and save web images for further editing. The positioning of a certain image in web pages with a large number of images, such as the image search results, is also troublesome and time-wasting, especially for mobile devices with small screens. In this paper, we propose to enable real-time interactive access to web images and design three modes of browsing web images including normal mode, starred mode and advanced mode. We implement a plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer, called iWeblmage, which incorporates efficient computer graphics algorithms and provides a customized user interface supporting real-time interactive access to web images. Experimental results show the usage scenarios of the three browsing modes and prove that iWeblmage is well accepted by users.