Integrating Semantic and Visual Facets for Browsing Digital Photo Collections

Managing photos by using low-level visual features is a powerful, yet imprecise, organization paradigm. The same is true if only keywords (or tags) are used. In this paper we present a new browsing and search system, named Scenique, that allows the user to manage her photo collections by using both visual features and tags, all homogeneously organized into a set of (visual and semantic, respectively) hierarchical facets. We present the basic principles of Scenique, describe the building blocks of its software architecture, and provide evidence of its effectiveness, as evaluated by a set of real users.