Automatic Generation of Coherent Image Galleries in Virtual Reality

Authors
Simon Peterhans, Loris Sauter, Florian Spiess, Heiko Schuldt
Type
In Proceedings
Date
2022/9
Appears in
Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL '22)
Location
Padua, Italy
Publisher
Springer
Abstract

With the rapidly increasing size of digitized and born-digital multimedia collections in archives, museums and private collections, manually curating collections becomes a nearly impossible task without disregarding large parts of the collection. In this paper, we propose the use of Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) to automatically generate coherent image galleries that allow intuitive, user-driven exploration of large multimedia collections in virtual reality (VR). We extend the open-source VR museum VIRTUE to support such exhibitions and apply it on different collections using various image features. A successful pilot test took place at the Basel Historical Museum with more than 300 participants.