Visipedia – A distributed visual system composed of machines and people

The web is not perfect: while text is easily searched and organized, pictures (the vast majority of the bits that one can find on-line) are not. In order to see how one could improve the web and make pictures first-class citizens of the web, I explore the idea of Visipedia, a visual interface for Wikipedia that is able to answer visual queries and enables experts to contribute and organize visual knowledge. Four distinct groups of humans would interact through Visipedia: users, experts, visual workers and machine vision scientists. The latter would gradually build automata able to interpret images. I will explore some of the technical challenges involved in making Visipedia happen and present our initial results in crowdsourcing visual annotation, building automated field guides and combining machines and humans for discovering, harvesting and organizing visual information. http://vision.caltech.edu/visipedia/index.html

Joint work with S. Belongie, S. Branson, R. Gomes, K. Wah, P. Welinder