Abstract:
The field of visualization has addressed navigation of very large datasets,
usually meshes and volumes. Significantly less attention has been devoted to
the issues surrounding navigation of very large images. In the last few years
the explosive growth in the resolution of camera sensors and robotic image
acquisition techniques has widened the gap between the display and image
resolutions to three orders of magnitude or more. This paper presents the
first steps towards navigation of very large images, particularly landscape
images, from an interactive visualization perspective. The grand challenge in
navigation of very large images is identifying regions of potential interest.
In this paper we outline a three-step approach. In the first step we use
multi-scale saliency to narrow down the potential areas of interest. In the
second step we outline a method based on statistical signatures to further
cull out regions of high conformity. In the final step we allow a user to
interactively identify the exceptional regions of high interest that merit
further attention. We show that our approach of progressive elicitation is
fast and allows rapid identification of regions of interest. Unlike previous
work in this area, our approach is scalable and computationally reasonable on
very large images. We validate the results of our approach by comparing them
to user-tagged regions of interest on several very large landscape images
from the Internet.