  The visualization of an image collection is the process of displaying a
collection of images on a screen under some specific layout requirements. This
paper focuses on an important problem that is not well addressed by the
previous methods: visualizing image collections into arbitrary layout shapes
while arranging images according to user-defined semantic or visual
correlations (e.g., color or object category). To this end, we first propose a
property-based tree construction scheme to organize images of a collection into
a tree structure according to user-defined properties. In this way, images can
be adaptively placed with the desired semantic or visual correlations in the
final visualization layout. Then, we design a two-step visualization
optimization scheme to further optimize image layouts. As a result, multiple
layout effects including layout shape and image overlap ratio can be
effectively controlled to guarantee a satisfactory visualization. Finally, we
also propose a tree-transfer scheme such that visualization layouts can be
adaptively changed when users select different "images of interest". We
demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach through the comparisons
with state-of-the-art visualization techniques.
