Crowdsourcing for Rating Image Aesthetic Appeal

Abstract

Crowdsourcing has the potential to become a preferred tool to study image aesthetic appeal preferences of users. Nevertheless, some reliability issues still exist, partially due to the sometimes doubtful commitment of paid workers to perform the rating task properly. In this paper we compare the reliability in scoring image aesthetic appeal of both a paid and a volunteer crowd. We recruit our volunteers through Facebook and our paid users via Microworkers. We conclude that, whereas volunteer participants are more likely to leave the rating task unfinished, when they complete it they do so more reliably than paid users.