[Paper Review] Loud and Trendy: Crowdsourcing Impressions of Social Ambiance in Popular Indoor Urban Places

Darshan Santani, Daniel Gática-Pérez|Infoscience (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)|Mar 5, 2014

Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis35 references21 citations

TL;DR

This paper proposes a crowdsourcing framework using Foursquare images to characterize indoor urban ambiance across 300 popular venues in six global cities. It demonstrates that social media images reliably convey ambiance across 13 dimensions, with strong visual cues enabling consistent perception, and reveals mostly similar aggregated impressions across cities despite minor cultural differences in 'bohemian,' 'artsy,' 'old fashioned,' and 'off the beaten path' dimensions.

ABSTRACT

New research cutting across architecture, urban studies, and psychology is contextualizing the understanding of urban spaces according to the perceptions of their inhabitants. One fundamental construct that relates place and experience is ambiance, which is defined as "the mood or feeling associated with a particular place". We posit that the systematic study of ambiance dimensions in cities is a new domain for which multimedia research can make pivotal contributions. We present a study to examine how images collected from social media can be used for the crowdsourced characterization of indoor ambiance impressions in popular urban places. We design a crowdsourcing framework to understand suitability of social images as data source to convey place ambiance, to examine what type of images are most suitable to describe ambiance, and to assess how people perceive places socially from the perspective of ambiance along 13 dimensions. Our study is based on 50,000 Foursquare images collected from 300 popular places across six cities worldwide. The results show that reliable estimates of ambiance can be obtained for several of the dimensions. Furthermore, we found that most aggregate impressions of ambiance are similar across popular places in all studied cities. We conclude by presenting a multidisciplinary research agenda for future research in this domain.

Motivation & Objective

• To investigate whether social media images can serve as a scalable, reliable data source for capturing the ambiance of popular indoor urban venues.
• To identify which types of images are most informative for conveying ambiance perceptions.
• To assess how people collectively perceive urban indoor places along 13 multidimensional ambiance constructs.
• To explore cross-cultural and cross-geographic similarities and differences in ambiance perception across six global cities.
• To establish a foundation for future multimedia research on ambiance, including automated recognition and long-tail venue analysis.

Proposed method

• Collected 50,000 Foursquare images from 300 popular indoor urban venues across six cities (e.g., New York, Paris, Tokyo).
• Designed a crowdsourcing framework using Amazon Mechanical Turk to evaluate image suitability for conveying ambiance.
• Conducted a second crowdsourcing experiment to rate each venue on 13 ambiance dimensions (e.g., loud, trendy, romantic, artsy).
• Used statistical analysis to assess inter-rater reliability and consistency of ambiance perceptions across cities.
• Employed image categorization to compare perception differences between image types (e.g., wide-angle vs. close-up, people vs. environment).
• Released the dataset and annotations publicly to support future research in ambiance perception and multimedia analysis.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 Can social media images be reliably used to infer the ambiance of indoor urban venues?
• RQ2 Which image categories (e.g., environmental views, people, signage) are most informative for ambiance perception?
• RQ3 To what extent do people’s perceptions of ambiance vary across different cities, and are there culturally significant differences?
• RQ4 Which ambiance dimensions can be reliably estimated from visual data alone?
• RQ5 How can ambiance perception be leveraged for applications in place discovery and venue optimization?

Key findings

• Images with clear, unobstructed views of the indoor environment were significantly more informative for ambiance perception than other image types.
• Reliable estimates of ambiance were obtained for several of the 13 dimensions, indicating strong visual cues in social media images for forming place impressions.
• Aggregated ambiance impressions across popular venues were largely consistent across the six cities studied, suggesting shared perceptual patterns in urban ambiance.
• Statistically significant differences were found in perceptions of 'bohemian,' 'artsy,' 'old fashioned,' and 'off the beaten path' dimensions across cities, indicating some cultural variation.
• The results support the feasibility of using social media images for scalable, cross-cultural ambiance analysis and suggest potential for automated recognition systems.
• The dataset of 50,000 Foursquare images with 13-dimensional ambiance annotations is publicly available for further research.