A Visual Search User Study on the Influences of Aspect Ratio Distortion of Preview Thumbnails

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.