Using Crowdsourcing for Scientific Analysis of Industrial Tomographic Images
Journal article, 2016

In this article, we present a novel application domain for human computation, specifically for crowdsourcing, which can help in understanding particle-tracking problems. Through an interdisciplinary inquiry, we built a crowdsourcing system designed to detect tracer particles in industrial tomographic images, and applied it to the problem of bulk solid flow in silos. As images from silo-sensing systems cannot be adequately analyzed using the currently available computational methods, human intelligence is required. However, limited availability of experts, as well as their high cost, motivates employing additional nonexperts. We report on the results of a study that assesses the task completion time and accuracy of employing nonexpert workers to process large datasets of images in order to generate data for bulk flow research. We prove the feasibility of this approach by comparing results from a user study with data generated from a computational algorithm. The study shows that the crowd is more scalable and more economical than an automatic solution. The system can help analyze and understand the physics of flow phenomena to better inform the future design of silos, and is generalized enough to be applicable to other domains.

Design

Algorithms

silo

Silo

Computer Science

algorithms

crowdsourcing

particle tracking

hough transform

tomography

circle detection

Human Factors

Author

C. Chen

National University of Singapore (NUS)

Pawel Wozniak

Chalmers, Applied Information Technology (Chalmers), Interaction design

A. Romanowski

Lodz University of Technology

Mohammad Obaid

Chalmers, Applied Information Technology (Chalmers), Interaction design

T. Jaworski

Lodz University of Technology

J. Kucharski

Lodz University of Technology

K. Grudzień

Lodz University of Technology

S. D. Zhao

National University of Singapore (NUS)

Morten Fjeld

Chalmers, Applied Information Technology (Chalmers), Interaction design

ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology

2157-6904 (ISSN) 2157-6912 (eISSN)

Vol. 7 4 52

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

Computational Mathematics

DOI

10.1145/2897370

More information

Latest update

10/16/2023