Browsing image database using network spanners

Images in a database can be modeled by a network whose nodes represent the images and whose edges code the similarity between images with respect to descriptors such as EXIF settings, color, or texture features. In this paper we borrow from distributed computing the concept of network spanners to extract a sub-network that captures the essential relationships and leads to a meaningful, non-cluttered and systematic visual interface for the database. A spanner optimizes the total edge cost of the resultant sub-network while maintaining its distance profile - the path length between any two nodes in the resultant is never stretched beyond a bound. A visual interface for a typical image database and its usage is presented in this paper.