ISM2008 presentation "Reminiscing View: Event-Based Browsing of Consumer’s Photo and Video-Clip Collections" by Chen and Hibino

1. Reminiscing View:
Event-Based Browsing of Consumer’s Photo and
Video-Clip Collections
Jiajian Chen Stacie Hibino
Georgia Institute of Technology Eastman Kodak Company
(work conducted at Eastman Kodak Company) hibino@kodak.com
jchen30@mail.gatech.edu
ISM 2008 Conference Presentation
16 December 2008

2. Overview
Problem Statement and Approach
System Overview
Hierarchical Event Clustering
Reminiscing View: System Description
User Study
Related Work
Summary
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 2

3. Problem Statement and Approach
Problem
• Increasing size of consumer photo and video clip collections
• Increasingly challenging to review
– Overview of full collection
– Trends in collection over time
– Clusters in collection conducive to reminiscing
Approach
• Reminiscing View application for browsing photo and video clip
collections by hierarchical event, incorporating
– Automatically clustered and labeled events
– Novel spiral layout
– Filter and search features for quick and easy clustering and selection
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 3

4. System Overview
Kodak Server
2. Index
1. Upload pictures Hierarchical
& video clips Event Clusters
User
3. Send Query and
4. View Pictures Retrieve Event
Grouped by Media
Events
Kodak Reminiscing View
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 4

5. Hierarchical Event Clustering
Europe
Super-Events
vacation
Events
London Paris Halloween
Notre
Eiffel
Sub-Events
Dame
tower
… …M … … Media
M M M M M M M
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 5

6. Event Clustering and Auto-Labeling
Unorganized collection
Use Date, Time, Metadata,
and Image Content Analysis
to Automatically Group and Label
Organized event grouping with label
Label May 28, 2002
Super event
Label Memorial Day
Reference: Loui and Savakis (2000)
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 6

7. Reminiscing View: Screen Layout
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 7

8. Visualization Layouts
Grid View Layout
• Chronological display of event thumbnails
in a uniform grid layout
• Familiar layout
• Fast visual scanning
History Spiral View Layout
• Chronological display of event thumbnails
in Archimedes spiral layout
• Alternative layout to traditional grid layout
• Default position and size indicate relative
time (more recent events are larger)
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 8

9. User Interactions
View Options
• Event order
• Zoom and pan
• Event level
• Wiimote interface
Event Node Interactions
• Mouse hover over event thumbnail for
zoom + date
• Left-click event to expand thumbnail and
display child media
• Right-click event thumbnail to restore to
original size
Full-Size Image Viewing
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 9

10. Expanded Icons, Mouse Hover, Child Media
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 10

11. Spiral Thumbnail Zoom: Before and After
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 11

12. Spiral Layout: Thumbnail Placement
Layout of event image thumbnail along spiral is
determined by Archimedes Spiral Equation so
that every image is properly placed and the
whole spiral is neither sparse nor crowded
Spiral equation in polar coordinates : r = kα + r0
Initialization : α = 0, r0 = avg. image diagonal length, k = 5 × r0
(assumes k < 1; image diagonal length is thus also < 1, normalized for screen area)
Iteration: For each image i, its center is decided by polar coordinate ( ri , θi ), where :
ri = kα + r0
β = Imagei diagonal length / ri
θi = α + β / 2
α =α +β (All angles (α , β , θi ) are expressed in radians.)
End For
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 12

13. Full-Size Image Viewing
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 13

14. Filter and Search
Month-Year Filter
Filter by Sharing Group
Keyword Search
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 14

15. User Study
Participants
• Five female and two male users
• Ages 20 to 50
• Externally recruited and compensated for participation
System set-up
• Preliminary version of Reminiscing View tested
• Did not include the month-year selection widget, full-size image
viewing, or Wiimote interface
• Users could view by event or sub-event level versus by top- and
bottom-level events
• Subjects browsed their own personal image and video clip
collections, which were uploaded to the server prior to user sessions
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 15

16. Participants’ Photo Collections
# of Avg
# of # of
ID Time span Gender
sub- images
images events
events / event
U1 2003-2007 858 68 310 12.62 male
U2 2004-2007 661 45 242 14.69 female
U3 2000-2007 3918 202 1512 19.4 female
U4 2003-2007 798 98 253 8.14 female
U5 2004-2006 1210 68 318 17.79 male
U6 2004-2007 344 18 120 19.11 female
U7 2000-2007 531 47 207 11.3 female
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 16

17. Methodology
Individual User Testing
1-2 hour Sessions Consisting of
• Event sorting: Users sorted all of their Events into one of four user-
specified sharing groups
• Documentation review: Description of key system features and a
summary sheet
• Training: Series of simple tasks, stepping users through system
features and options; test collection used for training
• Unstructured exploration of personal collections: Free
exploration of personal collection with the system
• Post-survey: Survey with user ratings and open-ended questions
• Informal interview: To clarify and follow up on any open-ended
comments from the survey or noted during the user session
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 17

18. User Study: Key Findings
Layout and Thumbnails
• Spiral and grid layout both easy to use
• Spiral layout provides insights for some users
• Thumbnail size matters
• More thumbnails are not necessarily better
Filtering
• Event-level viewing is preferred
• Filtering by sharing group is useful
Sharing
• Potential for sharing recognized
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 18

19. Related Work
Visualization Systems Inspiring Reminiscing
• Visualizing email content (Viegas, Golder and Donath, 2006)
• PostHistory (Viegas, Boyd, Nguyen, Potter and Donath, 2004)
• PhotoArcs (Ames and Manguy, 2006)
Event-Based Photo Browsing Systems
• PhotoTOC (Platt, Czerwinski and Field, 2002)
• TimeQuilt (Huynh, Drucker, Baudisch and Wong, 2005)
Other Photo Organization Systems
• World Explorer (Ahern, Naaman, Nair, and Yang, 2007)
• PhotoMesa (Bederson, 2001)
• Riya (riya.com)
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 19

20. Summary
Reminiscing View provides a new visualization system
for browsing consumer-based photo and video clip
collections by hierarchical event
User study showed system easy to use, although
varied preferences for spiral versus grid layout
Current version now incorporates
• Updated screen layout to enhance spiral and details viewing
• Month-year widget for efficient month- and year-based filtering (which
is well aligned with users’ capture habits)
• Full-size image viewing for greater emotional impact
• Wiimote interface for using the system in a social, “lean back”
environment
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2008 20