Visual islands: intuitive browsing of visual search results

The amount of available digital multimedia has seen exponential growth in recent years. While advances have been made in the indexing and searching of images and videos, less focus has been given to aiding users in the interactive exploration of large datasets. In this paper a new framework, called visual islands, is proposed that reorganizes image query results from an initial search or even a general photo collection using a fast, non-global feature projection to compute 2D display coordinates. A prototype system is implemented and evaluated with three core goals: fast browsing, intuitive display, and non-linear exploration. Using the TRECVID2005[15] dataset, 10 users evaluated the goals over 24 topics. Experiments show that users experience improved comprehensibility and achieve a significant page-level precision improvement with the visual islands framework over traditional paged browsing.