3-D Interfaces to Improve the Performance of Visual Known-Item Search

Most interfaces in the field of image and video search use a two-dimensional grid interface, which presents image thumbnails in a left-to-right arrangement that can be browsed from top to bottom. This grid interface, however, has several drawbacks that become particularly apparent when performing interactive search tasks for target items in large collections of images or videos. Therefore, we propose to use 3-D interfaces as an alternative to the grid interface for interactive known-item search in visual data as they can partially overcome these drawbacks. In this paper, we first summarize our ideas and discuss design aspects of a 3-D ring and a 3-D globe interface. Next, we present results from four different user studies, where we evaluated the performance of these interfaces for known-item search tasks in image collections. Our results from these studies show that the proposed 3-D interfaces allow for significantly faster visual target search on desktop computers with mouse interaction as well as on tablet devices. The interfaces also achieve better subjective ratings. However, our evaluation also shows that on smartphones with 3.5-in screens an improvement over the grid interface in terms of visual search time is only possible in collections with more than 200 images.