The term frequency of each spatial relationship used by the users to describe an image is visualized in the form of histograms for better comparison. The histograms are divided into two parts by a blue line to differentiate between the absolute and relative terms.
It can be seen from the histogram that for these images the spatial term ABOVE (relative) is the most frequently used term for all images including Image 2-9 as grouped and shown in Figure 4-2, except for Image 1 where the spatial term LEFT (absolute) is the most frequently used and Image 10 where the spatial term ON (relative) is the most frequently used. Both the histogram for Image 1 and Image 10 are shown in Figure 4-3. It is worth noting again that ABOVE and BELOW, and LEFT and RIGHT are reciprocal pairs and should perhaps be considered together.
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Figure 4-2 Histogram for Image 2-9
Absolute Terms Relative Terms Image 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
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Figure 4-3 Histogram for Image 1 and 10
For both spatial relationships, Table 4-3 show the most frequently used term for absolute and relative terms in all images. Although Image 2 and Image 10 show highest histogram values for Compass directions, this is still not considered as the most frequently used as its consist 8 directions terms, where in Image 2 the 7 frequencies are a total of 1 for East, West and South-West; and 2 for North and South. In Image 10, the 9 frequencies are a total of 1 for North and 2 for South, East, West and South-West.
Table 4-3 Most frequently used term by image.
Image Most Frequent
Absolute Term Most Frequent Relative Term 1 LEFT BELOW 2 BOTTOM ABOVE 3 LEFT ABOVE 4 RIGHT ABOVE 5 TOP ABOVE 6 BOTTOM ABOVE
7 BOTTOM and MIDDLE ABOVE
8 BOTTOM ABOVE
9 TOP and MIDDLE ABOVE
10 MIDDLE ON
Absolute Terms Relative Terms Image
1
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In general, all users used the objects suggested in the survey with an emphasis on some obvious objects when describing and annotating the absolute spatial terms used for the objects in the images; for example, the tree in Image 1 and 2, where the term LEFT (absolute) is the highest commonly used in Image 1 and BOTTOM (absolute) is highest commonly used in Image 2, probably because of the dominant position of the tree in both images. And if we look closely these patterns seem to be true for all other images as well, including the tower or castle in Image 3, the bridge in Image 5 and 9, the swan in Image 6, the building in Image 7, the flowers in Image 8 and the Eiffel Tower in Image 10, which produced the result as shown in Table 4-3.
Other than referring to the most obvious object in the image, the way humans look at an image may also vary and affect their way of describing the image. As this survey uses a screen shot with scroll up-to-down, it may also cause the users to use the ABOVE term more compared to BELOW when annotating the objects in the image. Other factors may be related to ethnography, a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which may for example explain why the term LEFT is sometimes used in preference to the term RIGHT. Ethnography can describe the nature of people (user) through their writing (Philipsen, 1992), for example how they write in their native language. Europeans and some Asians write left-right, Chinese write top-down, while Arabs write right-left.
To understand and analyse all these responses is quite challenging as the results reveal some interesting facts that show the variations of users’ perceptions even when looking at the same image. Some interesting notation made by the users, for example is the term BEHIND (relative), which has been used a number of times in Image 1, but sometimes it is used differently such as “The sun is behind the beach” and “The water behind the land”, this might be because users consider layers when looking at the image but it is certainly a reference to the 3-D world rather than the 2-D image plane.
In other examples, such as in Image 5, user descriptions are slightly diverse. Some examples are “the steel is in the bridge” which is not related to spatial relations in the image, and “the bridge lies on the left to the right” which shows how the spatial terms are sometimes used in unusual ways by users to express their description. As for Image 6, another diverse description is, “The swan is on the centre of the bottom”.
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However, the object water suggested for Image 7 was never used by the users, and this might be because of other suitable annotations such as lake which they felt was more appropriate to be used. As a result, users have added more objects to the images for annotation, but these are not listed in the objects column. This happened to most of the images annotations except for Image 6. The objects included were such as horizon and branches in Image 1, bench and skyline in Image 2 etc. These objects might be more appropriate for use based on the users’ perspectives and preferences.