Improved Evaluation and Generation of Grid Layouts using Distance Preservation Quality and Linear Assignment Sorting

Images sorted by similarity enables more images to be viewed simultaneously, and can be very useful for stock photo agencies or e-commerce applications. Visually sorted grid layouts attempt to arrange images so that their proximity on the grid corresponds as closely as possible to their similarity. Various metrics exist for evaluating such arrangements, but there is low experimental evidence on correlation between human perceived quality and metric value. We propose Distance Preservation Quality (DPQ) as a new metric to evaluate the quality of an arrangement. Extensive user testing revealed stronger correlation of DPQ with user-perceived quality and performance in image retrieval tasks compared to other metrics. In addition, we introduce Fast Linear Assignment Sorting (FLAS) as a new algorithm for creating visually sorted grid layouts. FLAS achieves very good sorting qualities while improving run time and computational resources.