Study on Distortion of Image and Video Thumbnails

Due to the highly diverse availability of digital cameras and camcorders with different input resolutions computer systems need to manage images and videos with different aspect ratios (e.g., 4:3, 16:9, 16:10, etc.). Therefore, developers of large-scale image and video browsing and retrieval tools need to find a way of either presenting all thumbnails with their correct aspect ratio, which often conflicts with a harmonic visualization, or to crop or distort thumbnails to one specific aspect ratio. In the paper "A Visual Search User Study on the Influences of Aspect Ratio Distortion of Preview Thumbnails" (to be presented at the International Workshop on Advances in Large-Scale Multimedia Data Collection, Mining and Retrieval at ICME 2012), the authors (David Ahlström and Klaus Schoeffmann) present results from a user study on the influence of aspect ratio distortion on visual search performance. The results show that even heavily distorted thumbnails do not notably influence visual search time or error rate. A preprint of the paper is available here.