Explainable Interactive Projections for Image Data

Abstract

Making sense of large collections of images is difficult. Dimension reductions (DR) assist by organizing images in a 2D space based on similarities, but provide little support for explaining why images were placed together or apart in the 2D space. Additionally, they do not provide support for modifying and updating the 2D space to explore new relationships and organizations of images. To address these problems, we present an interactive DR method for images that uses visual features extracted by a deep neural network to project the images into 2D space and provides visual explanations of image features that contributed to the 2D location. In addition, it allows people to directly manipulate the 2D projection space to define alternative relationships and explore subsequent projections of the images. With an iterative cycle of semantic interaction and explainable-AI feedback, people can explore complex visual relationships in image data. Our approach to human-AI interaction integrates visual knowledge from both human mental models and pre-trained deep neural models to explore image data. Two usage scenarios are provided to demonstrate that our method is able to capture human feedback and incorporate it into the model. Our visual explanations help bridge the gap between the feature space and the original images to illustrate the knowledge learned by the model, creating a synergy between human and machine that facilitates a more complete analysis experience. Firstly, I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Christopher North for his continued support in my research study. He was and remains my best role model for a teacher, mentor, and researcher.