Does organisation by similarity assist image browsing?

  • Authors:
  • Kerry Rodden;Wojciech Basalaj;David Sinclair;Kenneth Wood

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QG, UK;University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QG, UK;AT&T Laboratories Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1QA, UK;AT&T Laboratories Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1QA, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

In current systems for browsing image collections, users are presented with sets of thumbnail images arranged in some default order on the screen. We are investigating whether it benefits users to have sets of thumbnails arranged according to their mutual similarity, so images that are alike are placed together. There are, of course, many possible definitions of “similarity”: so far we have explored measurements based on low-level visual features, and on the textual captions assigned to the images. Here we describe two experiments, both involving designers as the participants, examining whether similarity-based arrangements of the candidate images are helpful for a picture selection task. Firstly, the two types of similarity-based arrangement were informally compared. Then, an arrangement based on visual similarity was more formally compared with a control of a random arrangement. We believe this work should be of interest to anyone designing a system that involves presenting sets of images to users.