This paper addresses the content overload problem applied to photo retrieval activities in the home environment. The starting point is an analysis of the main activities that users perform with their photographs. We then discuss two different interaction paradigms, namely browsing assistants and conversational search, which can provide software assistance to help users cope with increasing numbers of photographs. The major contribution is the presentation of an integrated architecture which combines these interaction paradigms to provide the user with a home-friendly, multimodal, and seamless system for photo viewing. We also discuss the user interaction aspects, internal architecture, and algorithms of each of the two paradigms.
Dario Teixeira, Wim F. J. Verhaegh, Miguel Ferreir