An on-line tool for browsing large image repositories

Image collections are growing rapidly, and effective tools to manage and interact with these repositories are highly sought after. In this paper we present an on-line tool, implemented in Adobe Flash^®, for exploring large image databases in an intuitive and efficient manner. In contrast to other approaches, which typically present images in a linear fashion, we employ a spherical visualisation space onto which we project image thumbnails (either on the inside or the outside of the sphere). Importantly, images are arranged so that visually similar images are located close to each other on the sphere. Organisation on a grid layout prevents image overlap and hence contributes to a clear presentation. Large image databases are handled through a hierarchical storage structure where each image in the visualisation can correspond to a cluster of images that can be expanded by the user.