Image browsers — Effective and efficient tools for managing large image collections

Visual information is becoming increasingly important and tools to manage these vast repositories of media collections are highly sought after. In this paper, we focus on images and image databases and how to effectively and efficiently access these. In particular, we present the idea of image browsers which provide an intuitive and interactive means of handling image collections. Not only do image browsers pose a useful alternative to retrieval-based systems, they also provide a visualisation of the whole image collection and let users explore particular parts of the collection. Apart from introducing the basic concepts and approaches of different image browsing approaches, we present two particular systems, the Hue Sphere Image Browser and the Honeycomb Image Browser, which were developed in our lab, as well as their recent ports to a large multi-touch environment for truly interactive image database navigation.