Abstract: The focus of our research is on improving mobile image and video browsing interfaces. To get a better idea about real world mobile photo and video scenarios and to base our research on real world numbers we performed a survey of photo and video usage on smartphones and tablets. In an online survey we asked 215 participants of the German speaking region about their mobile image collections, their usage patterns, and their motives and intentions when capturing photos. Our results show, among other things, that users store considerable more photos on smartphones than on tablets, that the majority of our participants use their smartphone as primary camera and that users are unlikely to organize their photos on their mobile devices in any way. Moreover, the most popular motives are people, holiday photos, events, and landscapes. Furthermore, it is more popular to capture photos for private than for sharing purposes. We also report about various correlation hypothesis that we tested in the gathered data.

Abstract: The Video Browser Showdown (VBS) is a live competition for evaluating video browsing tools regarding their efficiency at known-item search (KIS) tasks. The first VBS was held at MMM 2012 with eight teams working on 14 tasks, of which eight were completed by expert users and six by novices. We describe the details of the competition, analyze results regarding the performance of tools, the differences between the tasks and the nature of the false submissions.

Abstract: In this paper we evaluate a 3D cylindrical interface that arranges image thumbnails by visual similarity for the purpose of image browsing. Through a user study we compare the performance of this interface to the performance of a common scrollable 2D list of thumbnails in a grid arrangement. Our evaluation shows that the 3D Cylinder interface enables significantly faster visual search and is the preferred search interface for the majority of tested users.

Abstract: Interactive image and video search tools typically use a grid-like arrangement of thumbnails for preview purpose. Such a display, which is commonly known as storyboard, provides limited flexibility at interactive search and it does not optimally exploit the available screen estate. In this paper we design and evaluate alternatives to the common two-dimensional storyboard. We take advantage of 3D graphics in order to present image thumbnails in cylindrical arrangements. Through a user study we evaluate the performance of these interfaces in terms of visual search time and subjective performance.

Abstract: Default image browsing interfaces on touch-based mobile devices provide limited support for image search tasks. To facilitate fast and convenient searches we propose an alternative interface that takes advantage of 3D graphics and arranges images on a rotatable globe according to color similarity. In a user study we compare the new design to the iPad's image browser. Results collected from 24 participants show that for color-sorted image collections the globe can reduce search time by 23% without causing more errors and that it is perceived as being fun to use and preferred over the standard browsing interface by 70% of the participants.