Mapping Points of Interest Through Street View Imagery and Paid Crowdsourcing

The idea of the wisdom of the crowd is that integrating multiple estimates of a group of individuals provides an outcome that is often better than most of the underlying estimates or even better than the best individual estimate. In this paper, we examine the wisdom of the crowd principle on the example of spatial data collection by paid crowdworkers. We developed a web-based user interface for the collection of vehicles from rasterized shadings derived from 3D point clouds and executed different data collection campaigns on the crowdsourcing marketplace microWorkers. Our main question is: how large must be the crowd in order that the quality of the outcome fulfils the quality requirements of a specific application? To answer this question, we computed precision, recall, F1 score, and geometric quality measures for different crowd sizes. We found that increasing the crowd size improves the quality of the outcome. This improvement is quite large at the beginning and gradually decreases with larger crowd sizes. These findings confirm the wisdom of the crowd principle and help to find an optimum number of the crowd size that is in the end a compromise between data quality, and cost and time required to perform the data collection.

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Building a Fully-Automatized Active Learning Framework for the Semantic Segmentation of Geospatial 3D Point Clouds

Kölle,

Walter,

Sörgel

2024

PFG

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In recent years, significant progress has been made in developing supervised Machine Learning (ML) systems like Convolutional Neural Networks. However, it’s crucial to recognize that the performance of these systems heavily relies on the quality of labeled training data. To address this, we propose a shift in focus towards developing sustainable methods of acquiring such data instead of solely building new classifiers in the ever-evolving ML field. Specifically, in the geospatial domain, the process of generating training data for ML systems has been largely neglected in research. Traditionally, experts have been burdened with the laborious task of labeling, which is not only time-consuming but also inefficient. In our system for the semantic interpretation of Airborne Laser Scanning point clouds, we break with this convention and completely remove labeling obligations from domain experts who have completed special training in geosciences and instead adopt a hybrid intelligence approach. This involves active and iterative collaboration between the ML model and humans through Active Learning, which identifies the most critical samples justifying manual inspection. Only these samples (typically $$\ll 1{\%}$$ ≪ 1 % of Passive Learning training points) are subject to human annotation. To carry out this annotation, we choose to outsource the task to a large group of non-specialists, referred to as the crowd, which comes with the inherent challenge of guiding those inexperienced annotators (i.e., “short-term employees”) to still produce labels of sufficient quality. However, we acknowledge that attracting enough volunteers for crowdsourcing campaigns can be challenging due to the tedious nature of labeling tasks. To address this, we propose employing paid crowdsourcing and providing monetary incentives to crowdworkers. This approach ensures access to a vast pool of prospective workers through respective platforms, ensuring timely completion of jobs. Effectively, crowdworkers become human processing units in our hybrid intelligence system mirroring the functionality of electronic processing units.

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Mapping Points of Interest Through Street View Imagery and Paid Crowdsourcing

Cited by 7 publications

References 46 publications

QROWD—A Platform for Integrating Citizens in Smart City Data Analytics

QROWD—A Platform for Integrating Citizens in Smart City Data Analytics

Measuring the Wisdom of the Crowd: How Many is Enough?

Building a Fully-Automatized Active Learning Framework for the Semantic Segmentation of Geospatial 3D Point Clouds

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