Photo Browsing with Collage Trees sketches 0174

Technological advances in digital photography have made it possible to acquire and store more pictures than ever before. Unfortunately this has led to massively sized photo collections that becomes difficult to browse. We propose a novel interface to facilitate browsing these large collections. Our approach hierarchically groups the photos, summarizes the groups as a tree of collages, and allows the user to navigate the collection by traversing the tree. Our system automatically groups the photos and dynamically constructs the collage summaries generating a Collage Tree (Figure 1). At any time, the system presents a collage that summarizes some part of the collection, by clicking on a member of the collage the user selects a smaller subset of the photos that is again summarized as a collage or single photo if it is a leaf of the tree. The ideas in this paper draw on those of photo browsing, and collage generation. Research in photo browsing looks at different ways of allowing a user to efficiently go through collections of photographs; programs such as Picasa and ACDSee are examples of photo browsing software. When browsing, users are presented with every photo, which is undesirable when dealing with large collection. Recently researchers have been looking at using collages in order summarize a large collection of images [2]. In this way the user can get an overall impression of the photo collection by viewing a single image. However, by removing photos, this approach may detract from the overall browsing experience. By using a tree of collages, we are able to combine the benefits of both traditional photo browsing and collage summarization. Our system generates a tree structure containing collages and photos from a large collection of digital photographs. Each collage is a node in the tree summarizing the information, or photographs, beneath it. Each photo in the collage is an edge leading to a new node, or new collage summarizing the sub-tree that the photo represents. The original photos are the leaf nodes of the tree. By traversing some path of the tree, each photo can be accessed.