Image Matching Game

Scaling Up Marsh Science

Introduction

Please note that the Scaling Up Marsh Science Image Matching Game is currently offline for system upgrades. You are welcome to view the informational pages and links on this website, and reach out using the links on the Contact Us page if you would like to stay informed about our progress.

Please help us to better understand the ecology of the salt marsh. We have over 50,000 overlapping photographs of a salt marsh, taken every year starting in 2010, and need to align them to make mosaics so that we can create detailed maps for each year. Because the images are taken from close to the marsh surface, and lack strong visual features, software programs are unable to align them automatically. The "Image Matching Web Interface" allows citizen scientists like you to help us by identifying matching features in pairs of photographs. This information will then be used to create a photographic map of a large area, and to study how this area changes from year to year.

Players must first learn to identify matching features in "training" images. They then proceed to the next level in which they provide new data by identifying matching features in unprocessed images. Your contribution to this project is invaluable to us. At the same time, we hope you'll learn some interesting facts about salt marshes and their importance to us.

 
Department of Computer Science
Modeling and Computational Science Lab
Virtual Prairie