About this site

The THON PhotoBase was designed for Penn State's student-run Dance Marathon in order to provide a centralized database of digital pictures taken by YOU. This site allows for easy image retrieval through advanced searching and browsing of submitted photos based on criteria such as THON year, event, photographer and keywords. Clicking on an image thumbnail provides detailed information about the photograph, as well as the option to download the full-sized image and find similar images. To contribute your own THON photos to the website, simply upload them for approval, being sure to describe the image with keywords and event information so others can find your photo!

THON PhotoBase was originally designed and developed at Penn State as a final project for the Fall 2005 section of IST 402, an emerging technologies course offered by the School of Information Sciences and Technology. In this section of IST 402 taught by Professor Prasenjit Mitra, we studied emerging technologies in database systems. Our group, consisting of team members Reid Exley, Tom Hubbell, Benjamin Niebel and Clark Rexrode, chose to create the THON PhotoBase in order to fill the need for a centralized, searchable library of THON photographs taken by students. The creation of this project represents the culmination of this semester's coursework in database systems integrated with additional knowledge of PHP, Perl and web design. The integration of the "Find Similar" feature was made possible by research conducted by Professor James Wang and Jia Li at PSU. Read more about their research on content-based image retrieval using SIMPLIcity. Feel free to provide us with your feedback.