{"title":"A Visual Search User Study on the Influences of Aspect Ratio Distortion of Preview Thumbnails","authors":"David Ahlström, Klaus Schöffmann","doi":"10.1109/ICMEW.2012.101","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Most image and video retrieval tools used for large-scale media collections present query results as thumbnails arranged in a grid-like display with each thumbnail preserving the aspect ratio of its corresponding source image or video. Often, the outcome of a query is a set of thumbnails with different aspect ratios, thus a varying amount of padding space is used between the thumbnails in the display. This results in a visually erratic display that conflicts with interface design rules and aesthetic principles stipulating alignment and the usage of straight visual lines to guide the human eye while scanning the display. A solution is to create equally sized thumbnails by using cropping algorithms. However, this may remove useful search information. We investigated a simple alternative: to distort thumbnails to the same aspect ratio in order to provide a calm and structured display with straight lines between thumbnails. In a user experiment we evaluated whether and how much such a horizontal distortion can be applied without hampering visual search performance. The results show that distortion does not notably influence error rate and visual search time.","PeriodicalId":385797,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo Workshops","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2012-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"2012 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo Workshops","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICMEW.2012.101","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Most image and video retrieval tools used for large-scale media collections present query results as thumbnails arranged in a grid-like display with each thumbnail preserving the aspect ratio of its corresponding source image or video. Often, the outcome of a query is a set of thumbnails with different aspect ratios, thus a varying amount of padding space is used between the thumbnails in the display. This results in a visually erratic display that conflicts with interface design rules and aesthetic principles stipulating alignment and the usage of straight visual lines to guide the human eye while scanning the display. A solution is to create equally sized thumbnails by using cropping algorithms. However, this may remove useful search information. We investigated a simple alternative: to distort thumbnails to the same aspect ratio in order to provide a calm and structured display with straight lines between thumbnails. In a user experiment we evaluated whether and how much such a horizontal distortion can be applied without hampering visual search performance. The results show that distortion does not notably influence error rate and visual search time.