Is That a Jaguar?
Gülcan Can, Jean‐Marc Odobez, Daniel Gática-Pérez · 2014
Crowdsourcing is popular in multimedia research to obtain image annotation and segmentation data at scale. In the context of analysis of cultural heritage materials, we propose a novel crowdsourced task, namely the segmentation of ancient Maya hieroglyph-blocks by non-experts. This is a task that is highly perceptual and thus potentially feasible even though the crowd is not likely to have prior specialized knowledge about hieroglyphics. Based on a new data set of glyph-block line drawings for which ground-truth segmentation exists, we study how non-experts perceive glyph blocks (e.g. whether they see closed contours as a separate glyph, or how they combine visual components under plausible hypotheses of the number of glyphs present in a block.) Using Amazon Mechanical Turk as platform, we perform block-based and worker-based objective analyses to assess the difficulty of glyph blocks and the performance of workers. The results suggest that a crowdsourced approach is promising for glyph-blocks of moderate degrees of complexity.