Annotating Unconstrained Face Imagery: A Scalable Approach (original) (raw)

Grouper: Optimizing Crowdsourced Face Annotations

This study focuses on the problem of extracting consistent and accurate face bounding box annotations from crowdsourced workers. Aiming to provide benchmark datasets for facial recognition training and testing, we create a ‘gold standard’ set against which consolidated face bounding box annotations can be evaluated. An evaluation methodology based on scores for several features of bounding box annotations is presented and is shown to predict consolidation performance using information gathered from crowdsourced annotations. Based on this foundation, we present “Grouper,” a method leveraging density-based clustering to consolidate annotations by crowd workers. We demonstrate that the proposed consolidation scheme, which should be extensible to any number of region annotation consolidations, improves upon metadata released with the IARPA Janus Benchmark-A. Finally, we compare FR performance using the originally provided IJB-A annotations and Grouper and determine that similarity to the gold standard as measured by our evaluation metric does predict recognition performance.

Crowdsourcing Image Extraction and Annotation: Software Development and Case Study

Digit. Humanit. Q., 2020

We describe the development of web-based software that facilitates large-scale, crowdsourced image extraction and annotation within image-heavy corpora that are of interest to the digital humanities. An application of this software is then detailed and evaluated through a case study where it was deployed within Amazon Mechanical Turk to extract and annotate faces from the archives of Time magazine. Annotation labels included categories such as age, gender, and race that were subsequently used to train machine learning models. The systemization of our crowdsourced data collection and worker quality verification procedures are detailed within this case study. We outline a data verification methodology that used validation images and required only two annotations per image to produce high-fidelity data that has comparable results to methods using five annotations per image. Finally, we provide instructions for customizing our software to meet the needs for other studies, with the goal ...

Rethinking Crowdsourcing Annotation: Partial Annotation with Salient Labels for Multi-Label Image Classification

arXiv (Cornell University), 2021

Annotated images are required for both supervised model training and evaluation in image classification. Manually annotating images is arduous and expensive, especially for multi-labeled images. A recent trend for conducting such laboursome annotation tasks is through crowdsourcing, where images are annotated by volunteers or paid workers online (e.g., workers of Amazon Mechanical Turk) from scratch. However, the quality of crowdsourcing image annotations cannot be guaranteed, and incompleteness and incorrectness are two major concerns for crowdsourcing annotations. To address such concerns, we have a rethinking of crowdsourcing annotations: Our simple hypothesis is that if the annotators only partially annotate multi-label images with salient labels they are confident in, there will be fewer annotation errors and annotators will spend less time on uncertain labels. As a pleasant surprise, with the same annotation budget, we show a multi-label image classifier supervised by images with salient annotations can outperform models supervised by fully annotated images. Our method contributions are 2-fold: An active learning way is proposed to acquire salient labels for multi-label images; and a novel Adaptive Temperature Associated Model (ATAM) specifically using partial annotations is proposed for multi-label image classification. We conduct experiments on practical crowdsourcing data, the Open Street Map (OSM) dataset and benchmark dataset COCO 2014. When compared with state-of-theart classification methods trained on fully annotated images, the proposed ATAM can achieve higher accuracy. The proposed idea is promising for crowdsourcing data annotation. Our code will be publicly available.

Exploring the Use of Deep Learning with Crowdsourcing to Annotate Images

Human Computation, 2021

We investigate what, if any, benefits arise from employing hybrid algorithm-crowdsourcing approaches over conventional approaches of relying exclusively on algorithms or crowds to annotate images. We introduce a framework that enables users to investigate different hybrid workflows for three popular image analysis tasks: image classification, object detection, and image captioning. Three hybrid approaches are included that are based on having workers: (i) verify predicted labels, (ii) correct predicted labels, and (iii) annotate images for which algorithms have low confidence in their predictions. Deep learning algorithms are employed in these workflows since they offer high performance for image annotation tasks. Each workflow is evaluated with respect to annotation quality and worker time to completion on images coming from three diverse datasets (i.e., VOC, MSCOCO, VizWiz). Inspired by our findings, we offer recommendations regarding when and how to employ deep learning with...

Role of Task Complexity and Training in Crowdsourced Image Annotation

Computational Pathology and Ophthalmic Medical Image Analysis, 2018

Accurate annotation of anatomical structures or pathological changes in microscopic images is an important task in computational pathology. Crowdsourcing holds promise to address this demand, but so far feasibility has only be shown for simple tasks and not for high-quality annotation of complex structures which is often limited by shortage of experts. Third-year medical students participated in solving two complex tasks, labeling of images and delineation of relevant image objects in breast cancer and kidney tissue. We evaluated their performance and addressed the requirements of task complexity and training phases. Our results show feasibility and a high agreement between students and experts. The training phase improved accuracy of image labeling.

Integrating Crowdsourcing and Human Computation for Complex Video Annotation Tasks

2020

Video annotation is an activity that aims to supplement this type of multimedia object with additional content or information about its context, nature, content, quality and other aspects. These annotations are the basis for building a variety of multimedia applications for various purposes ranging from entertainment to security. Manual annotation is a strategy that uses the intelligence and workforce of people in the annotation process and is an alternative to cases where automatic methods cannot be applied. However, manual video annotation can be a costly process because as the content to be annotated increases, so does the workload for annotating. Crowdsourcing appears as a viable solution strategy in this context because it relies on outsourcing the tasks to a multitude of workers, who perform specific parts of the work in a distributed way. However, as the complexity of required media annoyances increases, it becomes necessary to employ skilled labor, or willing In: II Concurso...

A crowdsourcing approach to support video annotation

Proceedings of the International Workshop on Video and Image Ground Truth in Computer Vision Applications, 2013

In this paper we present an innovative approach to support efficient large scale video annotation by exploiting the crowdsourcing. In particular, we collect big noisy annotations by an on-line Flash game which aims at taking photos of objects appearing through the game levels. The data gathered (suitably processed) from the game is then used to drive image segmentation approaches, namely the Region Growing and Grab Cut, which allow us to derive meaningful annotations. A comparison against hand-labeled ground truth data showed that the proposed approach constitutes a valid alternative to the existing video annotation approaches and allow a reliable and fast collection of large scale ground truth data for performance evaluation in computer vision.

How clumpy is my image? Evaluating crowdsourced annotation tasks

2013

The use of citizen science to obtain annotations from multiple annotators has been shown to be an effective method for annotating datasets in which computational methods alone are not feasible. The way in which the annotations are obtained is an important consideration which affects the quality of the resulting consensus estimates. In this paper, we examine three separate approaches to obtaining scores for instances rather than merely classifications. To obtain a consensus score annotators were asked to make annotations in one of three paradigms: classification, scoring and ranking. A web-based citizen science experiment is described which implements the three approaches as crowdsourced annotation tasks. The tasks are evaluated in relation to the accuracy and agreement among the participants using both simulated and real-world data from the experiment. The results show a clear difference in performance between the three tasks, with the ranking task obtaining the highest accuracy and agreement among the participants. We show how a simple evolutionary optimiser may be used to improve the performance by reweighting the importance of annotators.

A Face Annotation Framework with Partial Clustering and Interactive Labeling

2007

Face annotation technology is important for a photo management system. In this paper, we propose a novel interactive face annotation framework combining unsupervised and interactive learning. There are two main contributions in our framework. In the unsupervised stage, a partial clustering algorithm is proposed to find the most evident clusters instead of grouping all instances into clusters, which leads to a good initial labeling for later user interaction. In the interactive stage, an efficient labeling procedure based on minimization of both global system uncertainty and estimated number of user operations is proposed to reduce user interaction as much as possible. Experimental results show that the proposed annotation framework can significantly reduce the face annotation workload and is superior to existing solutions in the literature.