Mobile Photo Album Management with Multiscale Timeline

Abstract

Traditional photo browsing systems developed for PCs are inefficient for browsing and searching of large photo albums on mobile devices due to the small screen size and limited mobile processing power. We propose a new concept in this paper, the multiscale timeline, where photos are grouped into clusters and displayed sequentially on a scaled timeline with user controllable time scales, enabling multiscale overview of the photo album for efficient browsing and searching. To address the slow speed of re-clustering when new photos are added, a new incremental spectral clustering algorithm is further developed, which is an order of magnitude faster than the traditional spectral clustering algorithm and its conventional incremental version. Our implementation of the system on mobile devices shows a better user experience and browsing efficiency based on the experiments over large real-world photo collections.