Browsing Abstract Art by Appearance

In this paper we describe an innovative browsing system that improves on the navigation of a large set of objects which are either difficult to label or categorize. We use a two-stage process to obtain similarity information from humans, which then becomes the core of the system, this perceptual information is then used to create a resizable self-organizing map which comprises a matrix of image stacks that provides a fast, intuitive and highly visual navigation environment. We report the methods used to obtain the similarity data from observer to derive the navigation system and illustrate this with an example from the