CrowdSight: Rapidly Prototyping Intelligent Visual Processing Apps

We describe a framework for rapidly prototyping applications which require intelligent visual processing, but for which reliable algorithms do not yet exist, or for which engineering those algorithms is too costly. The framework, CrowdSight, leverages the power of crowdsourcing to offload intelligent processing to humans, and enables new applications to be built quickly and cheaply, affording system builders the opportunity to validate a concept before committing significant time or capital. Our service accepts requests from users either via email or simple mobile applications, and handles all the communication with a backend human computation platform.We build redundant requests and data aggregation into the system freeing the user from managing these requirements. We validate our framework by building several test applications and verifying that prototypes can be built more easily and quickly than would be the case without the framework.