A Comparison of Measures for Visualising Image Similarity

Abstract

A low-level content-based measurement of image similarity can be used to create a visualisation of an image set, in which visually similar images are displayed close to each other. We are carrying out a series of experiments to evaluate the usefulness of this type of visualisation as an image browsing aid. So far, these experiments have used a complex image similarity measure that was designed for image retrieval, but we were interested in finding out if simpler measures could be just as effective. We created basic test collections of images from a widely available set of stock photographs, and used these to compare a number of different measurements of image similarity. Precisionrecall graphs show the expected differences between the measures with regard to retrieval accuracy. However, these differences disappear in a comparison of their effectiveness for creating visualisations. 1 Introduction Fully automatic methods of indexing and searching large collections of digital ima...