Evaluating perceptual visual attributes in social and cultural heritage web sites

Interaction with artwork collections can be made more effective by using creative web sites, applications or installations, which support the user in the discovery process by using new search and browsing paradigms. Here, we introduce some new image searching and visualization functionalities. We have exploited four perceptual visual attributes related to color to index the images: colorfulness, dominant colors, color moods and color harmony. These attributes are also used to display images in a 2D Map visualization to facilitate browsing of the retrieved results. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the implemented functionalities, we considered four different image collections of cultural heritage artworks, and, using the specifically designed MIDB portal, administered usability tests on a panel of subjects. The users performed different retrieval and browsing tasks. The analysis of the results of the tests shows that the users consider these new browsing and retrieval modalities engaging and useful on all the image collections evaluated.