Computer Science Assistant Professor Chaoli Wang, former CS undergraduate student John Reese, former CS MS student Huan Zhang, CS PhD student Jun Tao, and Physics Professor Robert Nemiroff will receive a Best Paper Award for their paper, “iMap: A stable layout for navigating large image collections with embedded search”, at the IS&T/SPIE Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis, February 3-6, 2013, in Burlingame, California. Jun Tao will present the award paper at the conference.
With the booming of digital cameras and image archiving and photo sharing websites, browsing and searching through large online image collections is becoming increasingly popular. This award paper targets the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), a popular online astronomy archive maintained by NASA and Michigan Tech, and presents a solution for image search and clustering based on the evaluation of image similarity using both visual and textual information. To lay out images, the paper introduces iMap, a treemap based representation for visualizing and navigating image search and clustering results. iMap strikes a good balance among simplicity, intuitiveness, and effectiveness by addressing key issues such as stable layout, screen utilization, and in-place interaction.
For their next steps, the authors will further develop techniques for animated transition and graph based image layout, deploy the visualization results on the display wall at the Immersive Visualization Studio (IVS) at the Center for Computer Systems Research (CCSR) for outreach, and eventually release a web based online program to benefit a wider user base.
