Achieving Complex Media Annotation through Collective Wisdom and Effort from the Crowd

Media annotation consists of supplementing media objects, such as videos, images, and audios, by adding metadata about their content and context, and describing media characteristics such as quality, encoding, among other features. Complex media annotation involves annotating different aspects of media objects as well as relating them to a context. This kind of annotation usually is associated with a demanding process that requires experts and elaborated annotation systems. This paper tries to overcome this issue and presents a method to achieve complex media annotation without requiring complex tools, experts nor trained workers. In this method, the complex annotation process is divided into a set of simple annotation microtasks, and based on them, a process workflow for generating complex annotations is defined. To demonstrate the execution of our approach, we developed a video enrichment system and carried out an experiment in which a crowd was responsible for executing a set of simple microtasks which are aggregated to produce enriched video content.