Brush-and-drag: a multi-touch interface for photo triaging

Due to the convenience of taking pictures with various digital cameras and mobile devices, people often end up with multiple shots of the same scene with only slight variations. To enhance photo triaging, which is a very common photowork activity, we propose an effective and easy-to-use brush-and-drag interface that allows the user to interactively explore and compare photos within a broader scene context. First, we brush to mark an area of interest on a photo with our finger(s); our tailored segmentation engine automatically determines corresponding image elements among the photos. Then, we can drag the segmented elements from different photos across the screen to explore them simultaneously, and further perform simple finger gestures to interactively rank photos, select favorites for sharing, or to remove unwanted ones. This novel interaction method was implemented on a consumer-level tablet computer and demonstrated to offer effective interactions in a user study.