A compact photo browser for smartphone imaging system with content-sensitive overlapping layout

People are encouraged to take more photos more easily and cost-effectively than ever due to the popularity of smart-phones equipped with a camera module. However, after taking many photos, it is a hard and tedious work to choose good quality photos from among all photos taken during travel. In addition, it requires us to organize and label by manual tagging and clustering memorable events. When we organize user's photos with smartphones, then there are other constraints, such as the small size of the screen panel. It is difficult to browse hundreds of photos with our fingers using most smartphones, such as iPhone and Galaxy S, with 3.5-4.3 inch screens. In addition, it is one interesting trend that smartphone users take multiple photos of a single scene to get good quality photo, since the image quality of a smart-phone camera is not clear compared to the general digital cameras and they are vulnerable to be shaken easily compared to high-end DSLR cameras. In this paper, we try to solve these problems in a small phone camera environment. We propose a novel method to place more than 100 photos effectively by overlapping identical photos(NIP). In addition, we exploit a light-weight spatio-temporal clustering algorithm for smartphone and two-pane interface with summarized photo collages. Our system helps people place more than 200 photos automatically in a single phone screen with a user-friendly browsing interface that enables us to set the viewing detail and overview configuration simultaneously. We conducted experiments to evaluate our system. The result shows that it accelerates browsing speed. A similar photo overlapping methodology enables us to obtain space efficiency of about 34% compared to the common grid-based photo layout system.