Asha Vellaikal and C.-C. Jay Kuo,
Hierarchical Clustering Techniques for Image Database
Organization and Summarization,
In C.-C. Jay Kuo, Shih-Fu Chang and Sethuraman
Panchanathan eds., Multimedia Storage and Archiving Systems III (VV02),
Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Vol. 3527 of SPIE Proceedings, pp. 68-79, November 1998. (SPIE Symposium on Voice, Video and Data Communications)This paper investigates clustering techniques as a method of organizing image databases to support popular visual management functions such as searching, browsing and navigation. Different types of hierarchical agglomerative clustering techniques are studied as a method of organizing features spaces as well as summarizing image groups by the selection of a few appropriate representatives. Retrieval performance using both single and multiple level hierarchies are experimented with and the algorithms show an interesting relationship between the top k correct retrievals and the number of comparisons required. Some arguments are given to support the use of such cluster-based techniques for managing distributed image databases.