New visual interfaces for image/video database access. While querying is used to precisely locate certain information, navigation and browsing, instead, offer the possibility
of exploring visual information spaces. As real-valued attributes are attached to visual data and a suitable distance function is chosen, each image is mapped into a point of a multi-dimensional space. Close points correspond to similar images. Two or thee-dimensional displays of such a space can show how images are distributed in it. Visualization tools are also very useful for video databases.