Browsing multimedia objects via composite icons

In multimedia databases, browsing paradigm can complement the weak querying capability on the media data with human cognitive capability. This allows users to navigate through the database without the deep knowledge of the textual query and the organization of the database. But there exist several drawbacks such as the overview of many objects and the repetitious short-sighted navigation. Still most existing browsing methods cannot overcome these drawbacks of the browsing paradigm simultaneously. Therefore this paper presents an enhanced icon browsing method that overcomes these drawbacks. This method allows users to browse the aggregation hierarchy of the multimedia objects and to compare and navigate through these objects via composite icons. In addition, we formalize the retrieval mechanism that seamlessly integrates querying and the proposed method with a running example