Z. Pan et al. (Eds.): Transactions on Edutainment V, LNCS 6530, pp. 224–239, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 An Interface to Retrieve Personal Memories Using an Iconic Visual Language Rui Jesus 2 , Teresa Romão 1 , and Nuno Correia 1 1 CITI, Departamento de Informática, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal 2 Multimedia and Machine Learning Group, Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa Rua Conselheiro Emdio Navarro nº1, Lisboa, Portugal rjesus@deetc.isel.ipl.pt, {tir,nmc}@di.fct.unl.pt Abstract. Relevant past events can be remembered when visualizing related pictures. The main difficulty is how to find these photos in a large personal collection. Query definition and image annotation are key issues to overcome this problem. The former is relevant due to the diversity of the clues provided by our memory when recovering a past moment and the later because images need to be annotated with information regarding those clues to be retrieved. Consequently, tools to recover past memories should deal carefully with these two tasks. This paper describes a user interface designed to explore pictures from personal memories. Users can query the media collection in several ways and for this reason an iconic visual language to define queries is proposed. Automatic and semi-automatic annotation is also performed using the image content and the audio information obtained when users show their images to others. The paper also presents the user interface evaluation based on tests with 58 participants. Keywords: Personal Memories, User Interfaces, Visual Languages, Image Retrieval. 1 Introduction Pictures are one of the richest ways to register and to preserve personal experiences. Currently, due to the advances in digital technology, their capture and storage are easier and very popular, even among people that are not very familiar with technology. Consequently, more experiences are being preserved but it also becomes more difficult to later retrieve media information of an event. Besides, these images are collected in a disorganized way without any type of annotation [5]. To recall this information, humans must remember something about that experience, e.g., the location, the date or the people around. Due to the diversity of the clues provided by our memory and the richness of the visual content, tools to search for personal media should provide mechanisms to use different types of queries including, keywords, images examples, sketches, or parts of maps. Additionally, these tools should not provide difficulties for users with low technological knowledge.