Web browsing

Digital imaging allows browsing of very high-resolution (up to 20k*20k) colorimetric images on the web. Since color is consistent, images from different sites may be compared on screen and differences in appearance are known to be due to real differences between the objects. This property is very valuable for art and conservation applications. To enable web browsing, high resolution browsing systems are being developed.

The Euro-Canadian Viseum project aims to allow network access to images from museum collections. The three components of the system are a small colorimetric network image viewer, a central indexing system to allow searches for images across all Viseum sites and a security and billing server to control access.

The server has a database, with web interface, of its collection. One of the database fields records the volume name and file name of the high-resolution image of the painting. In response to queries, pages generated by the database contain links with the appropriate embedded arguments to start a Java applet linked to the correct image.

The client is a Java one because it offers the most machine independent software although its performance handling images is not optimal. It displays an image in a scrolling area by requesting only those tiles it needs. A local cache prevents previously visited tiles from being retransmitted. The size of this cache determines browser performance in most situations.

The client server communication is shown below.

Source: [7]