Collaborative Games that help Image Based Searches

Posted on 17th June, 2010 by Shervin Emami

Here are a few websites that let you play collaborative games, which are actually being used to train AI programs to do Image Recognition. Children and adults around the world can have fun playing games with photos, and their actions give important "collaborative ground truth" to the AI recognition systems. Some of the games are actually very addictive!


http://www.espgame.org/gwap/ (I think this was the original website using the idea)
http://www.peekaboom.org/ (For some reason, the website redirects you to the ESP Game if you dont click a link quickly!)
http://www.peekaboom.org/phetch/ (Another game by the same group)

Google seems to have bought the original ESP Game, and is using it to improve Google Images:
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

 

Image-Based Search Engines

Here is a web search engine that lets you also search images using Face Detection. For example, you can tell it to search for "Paris", and then when it has pictures in France and pictures of Paris Hilton, you can select whether you want it to only show images of faces (using AI software to automatically detect a face within the image) or tell it to ignore faces, so it would show things like France:
http://www.exalead.com/search/image/

Google provides the same sort of feature but it's hidden. You have to add "&imgtype=face" to the end of the URL. Here is a website that lets you do the Google Images Face search easily:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-05-28-n84.html

The Exalead and Google Images search engines only do Face Detection, where it is trying to find ANY face within an image, which is different to Face Recognition, where you KNOW you have a picture of a face, but you are trying to figure out WHO it is.

They might sound similar, but they have completely different algorithms and problems to solve. When people talk about "Face Recognition", they usually actually mean "Face Detection"! But since when did mass media and common knowledge need to be based on true facts ;-)

There are a bunch of other websites besides these 2 that are also letting you do image recognition searches:
http://alipr.com/ (several types of object or face detection searches)
http://www.riya.com/ (several types of object or face detection searches)
http://www.attraseek.com/ (search for images like the one you uploaded)
http://www.pixsta.com/ (search for similar clothes to buy, using your uploaded image)
http://www.polarrose.com/ (automatically detect faces in your uploaded photos)
http://www.picollator.com/ (search for similar looking faces using Face Recognition on your uploaded image)