Stéphane Marchand-Maillet: Collection Guiding

Any computer user in faced with an increasing amount of visual information in digital form [images, videos,...]. There is, therefore, an urgent need for usable tools to mine and manage such document collections. We have proposed the Viper/GIFT system for content-based query-by-example image retrieval as a solution to the problem of mining visual collections. The strong assumption, however, that the user is looking for something or at least knows specifically what (s)he is looking for may not always be true.

We also present a »queryless« approach for the management of visual multimedia document collections. This directs us towards the concept of »Collection Guiding« where the user embarks on a tour through the multimedia space that is automatically created using state-of-the-art techniques for automated visual document analysis. Our approach re-locates the user at the center of the system and sets back the emphasis on Human-Computer Interaction.

http://viper.unige.ch/~marchand/research/index.html