Saliency-based visualization for image search

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for improving and visualizing image search results. The proposed algorithm improves user's image search experience by three steps: (1) re-rank the initial image search results by the random walk refinement based on visual consistency and saliency cues, (2) project the re-ranked images into a 2-dimentional panel according to their saliency information and correlations, (3) detect and extract the saliency regions in each image for final visualization. To evaluate the performance of our algorithm, user study has been conducted. Experimental results demonstrate that our visualization algorithm provides more pleasing image search experience than the conventional image search methods.