Why is similarity in appearance

May, : Paper available see Downloads. May, : Web launched. Abstract We present a model to measure the similarity in appearance between different materials, which correlates with human similarity judgments. Sandra Malpica 1. The Virage image search engine: An open framework for image management. Google Scholar. Callan, J. Cover, T. Elements of Information Theory. Wiley Series in Telecommunications.

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Pattern Recognition , 31 9 — The proposed method asks subjects to arrange cards on a poster sheet according to the degree of similarity of the objects. To compare the performance of the proposed method with the conventional one, we developed similarity maps of typefaces through the proposed method and through non-metric MDS.

We calculated the trace correlation coefficient among all combinations of the configuration for both methods to evaluate the degree of similarity in the obtained configurations. The threshold value of trace correlation coefficient for statistically discriminating similar configuration was decided based on random data.

The ratio of the trace correlation coefficient exceeding the threshold value was The required duration for the proposed method was approximately one third of the non-metric MDS's duration. In addition, all distances between objects in all the data for both methods were calculated. The frequency for the short distance in the proposed method was lower than that of the non-metric MDS so that a relatively small difference was likely to be emphasized among objects in the configuration by the proposed method.

The card arrangement method we here propose, thus serves as a easier and time-saving tool to obtain psychological structures in the fields related to similarity of appearance. Studies in psychology and cognitive science have attempted to structure the similarities among objects. Visualization of psychological structure has been intensively studied in the research field. The methods for visualization have been applied in practical-oriented study. For instance, Holleran visualized the relationship of similarity among 52 fonts as a map to extract common factors of fonts that people preferred.

Chen also established a visualized map concerning 74 registered design patents for cars for the purpose of planning design strategies. The geometrical approach has been employed to visualize the psychological structure. The geometric approach assumes that similarity or dissimilarity between the objects corresponds to the metric distances between the objects.

Multidimensional scaling MDS is one of the geometric model approaches and has been commonly used for analyzing data, testing structural hypotheses, and exploring psychological structure in various field e. Similarities between a pair of objects are transformed into a distance in a certain low-dimensional space and the objects are mapped into the space so as to satisfy each object's distance as best as possible.

In general, the number of space dimensions is to be determined based on the fitting value, Stress , which expresses the errors between the similarity data and the distance Kruskal, a. The dimension can be selected so as to decrease the stress value. This graphical display by MDS enables us to visually understand data structure even if there is no strong hypothesis that predicts patterns of data.

For instance of analyzing data, Borg and Groenen provided a two-dimensional MDS representation regarding the correlations of crime rates over 50 U. Although it was difficult to understand the relationship behind the crime data without the MDS, it turned out that the crime data could be categorized by several items. The meaning of these axes is not obtained by MDS so we need to find rules of interpretation for describing MDS configurations by using additional knowledge.

Another object of MDS is testing structural hypotheses. For example, Levy categorized 18 types of attitudes toward political protest acts and confirmed that experimental results can reflect this organizational principle by using MDS. In this case, a three-dimensional MDS configuration was needed to explain the organizational principle appropriately. MDS also enables us to discover the psychological structure that underlies similarity judgment. For instance, Wish collected similarity data among 12 nations from subjects and obtained the two-dimensional MDS configuration.

When we explore the psychological structure of a subject by MDS, the direct method is often used for collecting similarity data. Asking subjects to evaluate a numerical value for each pair of objects, such as for the 9-point scale, is one of the ways to collect similarity data directly. Using numerical value as similarity data may cause possible problems in the psychological field, because the value of the subjects' psychological distance is not interval scale but ordinal scale.

To resolve this problem, non-metric MDS has been introduced to use rank orders for similarity among objects to construct the object's configuration e. There are several procedures to collect order of similarity Borg and Groenen, One is to ask subjects to sort cards from the highest similarity pair to the lowest one. Another method is asking subjects to classify the pairs of objects into two groups according to similarity.

The pairs in each group are again classified into two groups in the same way. This procedure is repetitively performed until the subject thinks that it is no longer possible to find any differences in similarity among any pairs in the group. These methods are sometimes too time-consuming and demanding. Although MDS is a useful tool as noted above, there are some problems in MDS techniques for exploring psychological structure within the realms of experimentation.

Firstly, the subjects cannot assign meaning to MDS space. This makes it harder to understand one's psychological structure by translating the meaning of axes into a language, when there is no hypothesis or previous knowledge. If we take the subjects' workload into consideration, the number of objects should be limited to a relatively small number. Thirdly, when the number of objects increases, it becomes difficult to find a solution for meeting the relationship between each similarity data and each distance on MDS space.

In other words, the higher the number of objects is, the higher the stress value is Spence and Ogilvie, This study proposes a novel method to obtain the configuration of the psychological space of similarity data by experimental results without computational work. We expected that the configurations of MDS and the card arrangement method would be equivalent, because the configuration obtained by the card arrangement method should be reflected by the subjects' psychological space in the same way as by MDS.

We also expected that this proposed method would enable us to obtain the configuration of psychological space in a shorter time than MDS, because subjects can arrange the cards while seeing, comparing, and moving all of the cards simultaneously. We confirmed that each configuration of the card arrangement was approximately the same as that of nMDS. We found that the subjects exaggerated small differences between objects in the card arrangement method, which became a point of difference between the two methods.

We also found that the experiment time of the card arrangement method was shorter than that of nMDS. Our experiments were preapproved by the Ethics Committee of Kyushu University and informed written consent was obtained from each subject prior to testing.

Twenty volunteers participated in this experiment. They were divided into two groups comprising of ten subjects for each group, which were involved in two different experiments; namely, two conditions were employed according to a between-subjects design.

The subjects were undergraduate students without expertise in the field of typeface design. They consisted of 12 males and 8 females, and their mean age was All subjects were unaware of the exact purpose of this experiment and had normal or corrected to normal vision.

We chose 10 typefaces from among the roman type, the sans-serif type, and the slab-serif type, which can be easily obtained because they are installed in Mac OS X by default.

The cards were produced by PowerPoint Microsoft. The colors of the cards and characters were white and black, respectively. The cards were rectangular in shape, measuring 5 cm in length by 15 cm in width, and each card weighed less than 1 g. The typeface size of the letters was 22 points, except for Playbill. Since height-to-width ratio of Playbill is much higher than the others, we assigned 40 points for Playbill to equalize the size of the typefaces in appearance.

It is similar in appearance to a Holland Lop. It was a development of the earlier GAZ truck and is very similar in appearance. This gerbil is similar in appearance to the lesser Egyptian gerbil Gerbillus gerbillus and Anderson's gerbil Gerbillus andersoni. Males and females are similar in appearance , although females are typically smaller and may have smaller crests.

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The young fish are similar in appearance to adult fish.