AEye: A Visualization Tool for Image Datasets

TL;DR

AEye is an interactive visualization tool that uses contrastive learning to embed, organize, and explore image datasets in high-dimensional space, aiding understanding of dataset composition and biases.

Contribution

The paper introduces AEye, a scalable, extensible visualization platform that employs contrastive embedding and semantic search for comprehensive dataset exploration.

Findings

Enables intuitive exploration of image datasets.

Supports semantic search for images and text.

Open-source implementation available.

Abstract

Image datasets serve as the foundation for machine learning models in computer vision, significantly influencing model capabilities, performance, and biases alongside architectural considerations. Therefore, understanding the composition and distribution of these datasets has become increasingly crucial. To address the need for intuitive exploration of these datasets, we propose AEye, an extensible and scalable visualization tool tailored to image datasets. AEye utilizes a contrastively trained model to embed images into semantically meaningful high-dimensional representations, facilitating data clustering and organization. To visualize the high-dimensional representations, we project them onto a two-dimensional plane and arrange images in layers so users can seamlessly navigate and explore them interactively. AEye facilitates semantic search functionalities for both text and image queries, enabling users to search for content. We open-source the codebase for AEye, and provide a simple configuration to add datasets.