Amazon Mechanical Turk Task for the Jim Gray Search

Jim Gray Missing: Help find him by searching satellite imagery

You will be presented with 5 images. The task is to indicate any satellite images which contain any foreign objects in the water that may resemble Jim’s sailboat or parts of a boat. Jim’s sailboat will show up as a regular object with sharp edges, white or nearly white, about 10 pixels long and 4 pixels wide in the image. If in doubt, be conservative and mark the image. Marked images will be sent to a team of specialists who will determine if they contain information on the whereabouts of Jim Gray. Friends and family of Jim Gray would like to thank you for helping them with this cause.
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7 Comments

  1. Ben Meiry
    Posted February 2, 2007 at 9:25 pm | Permalink

    God knows I want to do my part and help mark images via Mechanical Turk, but there is so much noise/wave action/reflection activity going on the water, how do I choose among the dozens of white or nearly-white specks? Am I only looking for a whole boat? I will mark any image that has something plausible, but I fear I will likely only send false leads…A prayer, and off I go…

  2. Posted February 2, 2007 at 9:34 pm | Permalink

    This might help.

    http://openphi.net/tenacious/?p=88

    Still it is very hard.

  3. Posted February 3, 2007 at 12:43 am | Permalink

    Thanks for notifying me of this, I have been using mturk now and then for some time I will take out an hour or two to look through some of the pictures.

  4. Posted February 3, 2007 at 1:11 am | Permalink

    Took some minutes out of my mturk tasking to submit a post to /. about this, anyone with access to the firehose please mod it up ;)

  5. Lefty
    Posted February 3, 2007 at 8:06 am | Permalink

    How come ESRI isn’t involved with this? One would think they would have the people who could do this very well? Didn’t you ask them?

  6. Posted February 3, 2007 at 8:14 am | Permalink

    I don’t know the answers to those questions.

  7. Posted February 3, 2007 at 11:12 am | Permalink

    Amazon Turk needs to post some more info about the data. I’m assuming that if the 40′ Tenacious is 10px by 4px, then 1px is about 1meter. That helps resolve what could be a boat, piece of boat or not. The sample imagery mentioned in a comment above helps a great deal – and you’ll noticed that in 1 meter imagery, a bow of a boat is a signifcant feature.
    Most of what I’m seeing is clearly clouds and/or water turbulence.

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