[real-eyes] interesting article
- From: "Chip Bloch" <wbloch@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <real-eyes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 17:06:49 -0500
I received this article on another list that I belong to. I hope some of you
will find it as interesting as I did.
Chip
Gamers help the blind get the picture
* 13:37 16 May 2006
* NewScientist.com news service
* Paul Marks
Players are given a description and must then scour the web for the
correct picture
Gamers now have the perfect excuse to sit in front of their computers
all day * they can perform a public service.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, have designed an online game that aims to harness players'
brainpower to help make websites more accessible to blind people.
Visually impaired people often use text-to-speech converters called
screen readers to listen to the content of web pages spoken by a
synthesised voice. However, the pictures on most websites remain
inaccessible because very few have detailed captions to accurately
describe them.
The online game "Phetch", which will be made available at
http://www.peekaboom.org/phetch/, is designed to encourage other web
users to generate these missing captions. Played in groups of three to
five people, it randomly assigns the role of "describer" to one player;
the rest become "seekers".
Seek and find
The game then serves up a randomly chosen website image to the
describer, who has to write a pithy short paragraph about it. The words
are then sent to the seekers, who use search engines to hunt down the
correct picture on the web. The first seeker to find the image becomes
the describer in the next round.
If the describer's description is good enough to lead the seekers to the
picture, it is stored as a caption for that image. If not, the attempt
is discarded.
"We hope to collect captions for every image on the web," says Shiry
Ginosar, a member of the Phetch team. In tests, 130 players generated
1400 captions over the course of a week. At this rate, she says, just
5000 people could annotate all the pictures indexed by Google Images in
just 10 months.
Web designers
But Ginosar admits getting web designers the world over to use the
better captions may be tricky. "We are just concerned about gathering
caption data right now," she says.
Julie Howell from the UK's Royal National Institute for the Blind says
the game addresses a pressing issue. "The web is a great resource but as
it becomes more picture-led and graphical it should not become less
accessible for the blind," she told *New Scientist*. "It's true that
many pictures are simply uncaptioned or just have a filename."
The CMU team previously developed another game "Peekaboom" to help
improve image recognition algorithms. This game involves two players:
the first must reveal key parts of an image to the second person, who
must try to guess what is being revealed. The theory is that players
will reveal the most important parts of an image first. This could help
computers better identify unfamiliar images by focusing
Blog
This is a neat idea:
Images on the Web present a major accessibility issue for the
visually impaired, mainly because the majority of them do not have
proper captions. This paper addresses the problem of attaching
proper explanatory text descriptions to arbitrary images on the Web.
To this end, we introduce Phetch, an enjoyable computer game that
collects explanatory descriptions of images. People play the game
because it is fun, and as a side effect of game play we collect
valuable information. Given any image from the World Wide Web,
Phetch can output a correct annotation for it. The collected data
can be applied towards significantly improving Web accessibility. In
addition to improving accessibility, Phetch is an example of a new
class of games that provide entertainment in exchange for human
processing power. In essence, we solve a typical computer vision
problem with HCI tools alone.
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