NNk networks and automated annotation for browsing large image collections from the world wide web

This paper outlines a system for searching and browsing 1.14 million images from the World Wide Web (WWW) based on their visual content. At the heart of the system lies an automatically constructed network of images that can be navigated quickly by following its edges. The browsing experience is enhanced in a number of ways including multidimensional scaling of the graph neighbourhood for display purposes, Markov clustering of the image network to provide summaries of its content, and automated annotation of the images to allow users to access the network through text queries.