EventMask

Events emerged in the last years as a driving concept to efficiently index and retrieve media. Several approaches have been proposed to analyse the relationship between events and related media, to enable event discovery, event-based tagging, or event-based media retrieval. Notwithstanding the outstanding work done by several researchers in this area, a major still unsolved problem is how to understand the inherent link between visual concepts and events, and in particular, which are the key elements that allow a human being to perceive from a media collection what is the underlying event. In this demo, we address this problem in an original way by exploiting human knowledge using a game with a hidden purpose. Users are engaged in a competition, where they can alternatively try to mask a photo collection to prevent other users to recognize the related event or they can see a photo partially masked and try to guess the event connected. A set of rules and an adequate score system force players to focus on real important details, thus allowing the detection of most event-related salient parts of the media. The final result is a saliency map that, differently from the typical concept of saliency, highlights the visual concepts that are considered fundamental to perceive the nature of an event.