Abstract
Following advances in imaging technology as well as decreasing costs of related products and devices, information is becoming more and more visually oriented. Consequently, the management and retrieval of visual information such as images and image collections is receiving enormous interest. While for image databases the queryβbyβexample concept is at the moment the most commonly adopted retrieval method it is only of limited practical use. Techniques which allow humanβcentred navigation and visualisation of complete image collections therefore provide an interesting alternative. In this article we introduce an effective and efficient approach for userβcentred navigation of large image databases. Image thumbnails are projected onto either a plane or a spherical surface so that images that are visually similar are located close to each other in the visualisation space. To avoid overlapping and occlusion effects images are placed on a regular grid structure while large databases are handled through a clustering technique paired with a hierarchical tree structure which allows for an intuitive realβtime browsing experience. Β© 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 18, 137β145, 2008