[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] Image description game

[lisa]

Hi, This sounds very interesting! A game to add descriptions to 
websites.Article from New Scientist and from a blog.
Best,
Lisa
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn9177&print=true
http://joshuaink.com/blog/714/phetch


        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.