SHOEBOX: A DIGITAL PHOTO MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

This paper reports recent work at AT&T to develop a system for the management of personal digital photograph collections. Shoebox, the resulting software package, provides a range of browsing and searching facilities, utilising spoken annotations and image content to enable both semantically similar and visually similar images to be retrieved. We report on the design of the system, the construction of a test collection, and the evaluation of its searching facilities. The results show that audio annotation is an effective means of retrieval for photographs, which significantly out-performs image content-based techniques.