Does Flight Path Context Matter? Impact on Worker Performance in Crowdsourced Aerial Imagery Analysis

Natural disasters result in billions of dollars in damages annually and communities left struggling with the difficult task of response and recovery. To this end, small private aircraft and drones have been deployed to gather images along flight paths over the affected areas, for analyzing aerial photography through crowdsourcing. However, due to the volume of raw data, the context and order of these images is often lost when reaching workers. In this work, we explored the effect of contextualizing a labeling task on Amazon Mechanical Turk, by serving workers images in the order they were collected on the flight and showing them the location of the current image on a map. We did not find a negative impact from the loss of contextual information, and found map context had a negative impact on worker performance. This may indicate that ordering images based on other criteria may be more effective.