Visual clutter is something many of us encounter everyday, whether it is the clutter of items on a desktop, real or virtual, the clutter of signs on a busy street, or the clutter of objects on x-ray screening display. Our intuitions notwithstanding, we know surprisingly little about how to define visual clutter scientifically. We can judge it subjectively, but the problem of formulating an explicit definition has gone unsolved.
With NSF funding, Dr. Rosenholtz is using what we know about visual perceptual systems to develop a mathematical model that can estimate the degree of clutter in a visual display. The model is based on the simple notion that clutter begins when it becomes difficult to add items to a display without degrading performance. There is a counterintuitive consequence to this idea, which is that clutter is not a simple function of the total number of items. Instead, clutter is due to the complex interplay of a number of items with other factors such as item arrangement, shape, and color. The model will be tested against measures of clutter as perceived by human observers, in the context of a variety of visual displays. The measures include subject judgments as well as a number of established human performance metrics. The results of these experiments will advance our understanding of how visual scenes are perceived, and these advances may help with efforts to reduce clutter in displays where such efforts are helpful if not critical.
