Ordering Pictures by Dissimilarity

Imagine you want to post some pictures on the web, eg. for a social media post or a picture gallery on the web. Sometimes the context defines how the pictures have to be ordered, eg. in chronological order, but sometimes you also have the freedom to order the pictures, such that the presentation becomes more interesting.

The question is whether it is possible to automatically find an ordering for the pictures that makes the presentation more interesting to the user. The idea of this post is that the pictures should be ordered to maximize dissimilarity between consecutive pictures. It should catch the the viewers attention if the visual impression of two consecutive pictures is as different as possible.

A metric is required to formalize 'dissimilarity'. Different options exist here, but one approach is to look at the histograms of every picture and quantify the similarity between two pictures as the statistical distance between their histograms.

A script that implements this idea can be downloaded here (needs OpenCV). The Bhattacharyya distance is used as one example of a statistical distance. An example of a picture set in 'boring order' and a picture set that has been sorted as outlined above is shown below:

Lenna in 'boring order'

Lenna in 'interesting order'