Active Visual Recognition with Expertise Estimation in Crowdsourcing

Chengjiang Long, Gang Hua, Ashish Kapoor; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 3000-3007

We present a noise resilient probabilistic model for active learning of a Gaussian process classifier from crowds, i.e., a set of noisy labelers. It explicitly models both the overall label noises and the expertise level of each individual labeler in two levels of flip models. Expectation propagation is adopted for efficient approximate Bayesian inference of our probabilistic model for classification, based on which, a generalized EM algorithm is derived to estimate both the global label noise and the expertise of each individual labeler. The probabilistic nature of our model immediately allows the adoption of the prediction entropy and estimated expertise for active selection of data sample to be labeled, and active selection of high quality labelers to label the data, respectively. We apply the proposed model for three visual recognition tasks, i.e, object category recognition, gender recognition, and multi-modal activity recognition, on three datasets with real crowd-sourced labels from Amazon Mechanical Turk. The experiments clearly demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed model.