Improving the Efficiency of Content-Based Multimedia Exploration

Visual exploration systems enable users to search, browse, and explore voluminous multimedia databases in an interactive and playful manner. Whether users know the database´s contents in advance or not, these systems guide the user´s exploration process by visualizing the database contents and allowing him or her to issue queries intuitively. In order to improve the efficiency of content-based visual exploration systems, we propose an efficient query evaluation scheme which aims at reducing the total number of costly similarity computations. We evaluate our approach on different state-of-the-art image databases.