Measuring Visual Clutter

Ruth Rosenholtz
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology


Visual clutter concerns designers of user interfaces and information
visualizations. This should not surprise visual perception researchers,
since excess and/or disorganized display items can cause crowding, masking,
decreased recognition performance due to occlusion, greater difficulty at
both segmenting a scene and performing visual search, and so on. Given a
reliable measure of the visual clutter in a display, designers could
optimize display clutter, and systems could detect situations in which a
user's performance might be impaired.  Furthermore, a measure of visual
clutter could help generalize models like Guided Search (Wolfe, 1994) by
providing a substitute for "set-size" more easily computable on more complex
and natural imagery.  We have designed and tested several candidate measures
of visual clutter.  We explore the use of these measures as stand-ins for
set-size in visual search models, and demonstrate that they correlate well
with search performance in complex imagery. This includes the
search-in-clutter displays of Wolfe, Oliva, Horowitz, Butcher, & Bompas
(2002) and Bravo & Farid (2004), as well as new search experiments.