High-dimensional imaging is becoming increasingly relevant in many fields from astronomy and cultural heritage to systems biology. Visual exploration of such high-dimensional data is commonly facilitated by dimensionality reduction. However, common dimensionality reduction methods do not include spatial information present in images, such as local texture features, into the construction of lowdimensional embeddings. Consequently, exploration of such data is typically split into a step focusing on the attribute space followed by a step focusing on spatial information, or vice versa. In this paper, we present a method for incorporating spatial neighborhood information into distance-based dimensionality reduction methods, such as t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE). We achieve this by modifying the distance measure between high-dimensional attribute vectors associated with each pixel such that it takes the pixel's spatial neighborhood into account. Based on a classification of different methods for comparing image patches, we explore a number of different approaches. We compare these approaches from a theoretical and experimental point of view. Finally, we illustrate the value of the proposed methods by qualitative and quantitative evaluation on synthetic data and two real-world use cases.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.