Measuring visual clutter

Visual clutter concerns designers of user interfaces and information visualizations. This should not surprise visual perception researchers because 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. Furthermore, a measure of visual clutter could help generalize models like Guided Search (J. M. Wolfe, 1994) by providing a substitute for "set size" more easily computable on more complex and natural imagery. In this article, we present and test several…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• OO
  Office of Naval Research