Hierarchical image database navigation on a hue sphere

Due to the ever growing size of image collections efficient and effective ways of browsing and navigation through them as well as locating and searching desired images are in high demand. Most current approaches project image thumnails onto a 2-dimensional visualisation space so that images that are visually similar are placed close to each other on the display. Unfortunately, this approach is only of limited use for larger image sets as images are occluding each other while at the same time certain parts of the projection space are not utilised. In this paper we provide an image database navigation approach that does not suffer from these disadvantages. Images are projected on a spherical visualisation space which users can intutively rotate to focus on images with a different main hue or brightness. Thumbnails are placed on a regular grid on the sphere's surface to avoid any overlapping effects. Large image datasets are handled through a clustering technique which allows browsing in a hierarchical manner.