An Evaluation of Color Sorting for Image Browsing

Many image browsing tools employ a scrollable grid-like arrangement of thumbnails of images for enabling users to browse through image collections. The thumbnails in these arrangements are typically sorted by some kind of metadata, e.g., by filename or creation date. However, users looking for a specific image in mind prefer search by visual similarity rather than search based on simple metadata. In difference to previous work, which rarely present results from user studies, the authors provide empirical evidence that color sorting is an effective approach for that purpose. With a user survey, the authors identify which of six alternative color sorting algorithms produces the most intuitive result. The authors use the best algorithm, a simple HSV-based sorting method, and compare users’ visual search performance in a color sorted storyboard against performance in an unsorted storyboard. The results show that color sorting can improve user interaction, both in terms of subjective impressions and visual search times.