BubbleView: replacing eye-tracking to crowdsource image importance

Demo: http://bubbleview.namwkim.org/

Usage Description

We briefly describe how to use the bubbleview code based on the demo.

Add the necessary javascript files to your html file.

  <script src="js/stackblur.min.js"></script>
  <script src="js/nouislider.min.js"></script>
  <script src="js/diff.min.js"></script>
  <script src="js/bubbleview.js"></script>

nouislider.min.js is used for the time slider and diff.min.js is used for tracking description changes. You don't need diff.min.js if your task does not invole image description.

The bubbleview.js depends on stackblur.js a real-time image bluring library. We slightly modified its code as the original code forcibly changs the size of canvas to match the size of an input image. In our experiments, we did not use the stackblur library, instead pre-processed images to generate blurred images using a Gaussian blur filter using Matlab's imfilter(image, H, 'replicate') where H is fspecial('gaussian', radius, radius).

The bubbleview.js exports two functions setup(...) and monitor(...) whose definitions are:

  function setup(imgUrl, canvasID, bubbleR, blurR, task){
    ...
  }
  function monitor(imgUrl, canvasID, bubbleR, blurR, seeBubbles, seeOriginal, clicks, maxTime){
    ...
  }

bubbleR (bubble radius) and blurR (blur radius) are defined in pixels. task is an optional user-defined callback and it will be called whenever a user clicks on canvas to generate a bubble; each bubble (center, radius, timestamp etc) will be passed as a parameter to the callback.

clicks is an optional list of bubbles generated based on user clicks. monitor() expects its format to be the same as the one passed to the user callback; that is, an item in the list should have cx, cy and timestamp. maxTime is an optional timestamp limiting the number of bubbles drawn on the canvas (see the time slider in the demo). monitor() returns the total number of bubbles drawn given the maxTime option.

Post-fork description:

I simplified the interface so that it only includes the testing interface, commented out the monitoring interface, but its still available to use. Added in a randomizer into the next button so that when you click it it will show a random image (without repeats) and export the click and description data as a csv file. If at the end of the figure library, then it will show the ending image. Also changed the canvas size to be bigger and made the blur kernel and circle radius to be a static value (in bubbleview.js).

In order to run:

To run the bubbleview interface, I ran it on vscode and installed the extension called "Live Server". From this, go to the index.html file, right click the line that says "" and click "run on Live Server".