Representative images for browsing large image collections: a cognitive perspective

In large collections of images, one of the ways to facilitate browsing is by providing thumbnails of representative images. This paper seeks to examine the issue of choice of representative images within the categories. Towards this end, a study of free sorting of 50 images by 75 participants was conducted, in which they sorted the images into categories and selected a representative image for the categories and also indicated the prominent feature in the selected image. The results indicate that there is reasonable agreement in the choice of representative images and the selection of prominent features appearing in the images. The prominent feature seems to be one of the factors that have a bearing on the way people categorize.