This document describes research into crowdsourcing impressions of social ambiance from images of popular indoor urban places. The researchers collected images from social media of 300 popular cafes, restaurants, bars and clubs in 6 cities. They then conducted crowdsourced studies to determine which types of images best convey ambiance and whether ambiance dimensions like "loud" or "romantic" can be reliably assessed from images. The studies found that images clearly showing the physical environment were best for assessing ambiance and that reliable estimates of ambiance dimensions could be obtained from images, suggesting visual cues allow impressions of a place's ambiance to form. Future work will aim to identify specific visual cues that influence ambiance impressions.

1. Loud and Trendy: Crowdsourcing
Impressions of Social Ambiance
in Popular Indoor Urban Places
Darshan Santani, Daniel Gatica-Perez
Idiap and EPFL Switzerland
28 October 2015
ACM MM 2015, Brisbane

2. Which place looks more “romantic”?
A B

3. Which place feels more “loud”?
A B

4. Understanding Social Ambiance of Urban Places
Place impressions define our favorite hangouts and
shape our new discoveries
Social ambiance elicited by perceptual cues and prior
knowledge
Connections between psychological features of cities
and key indicators like well-being and prosperity
Our goal: to provide “a better idea of how people
perceive and experience places”

5. Brave New Idea?

6. Social
Media
Mobile
Technologies
Lots of images

8. Lighting
Spatial Layout
Flooring
Wall Decorations
Table Layout
Ceiling

9. Holistic study of place ambiance would involve
interpretation of multiple sources of information,
including subtle visual (and audio) cues → Many
challenges for multimedia research
Open Issue: Multimedia approaches to study social
perception of urban places.

10. Research Questions
● RQ1: What types of social media images are perceived as being
more informative of the ambiance of popular indoor places?
● RQ2: Can the ambiance of an indoor place be reliably assessed
by observers of social media images? If so, for what dimensions
of ambiance?

11. Dataset – Places
Singapore
NYC
Seattle
Mexico City
Barcelona Paris
50 popular places per city
Places: cafes, restaurants, bars, or clubs

12. Dataset – Places
Singapore
NYC
Seattle
Mexico City
Barcelona
Paris
50 popular places per city
Places: cafes, restaurants, bars, or clubs

13. Dataset – Places
Singapore
NYC
Seattle
Mexico City
Barcelona
Paris
50 popular places per city
Places: cafes, restaurants, bars, or clubs

14. Image Dataset #1
● Random Image Corpus
● 50,000+ images for all 300 places via 4SQ API
● 55% iPhone; 19% Android; 22% via Instagram
● Randomly selected 3 images per place for a total of 900 images

15. Image Dataset #2
● Physical Environment Image Corpus
● Clear views of the environment (manually chosen)
● 3 images per place for a total of 900 images

16. RQ1: What types of social media images
best convey the ambiance of popular indoor
places?
Use image corpora to judge which image selection
approach results in images being perceived as more
adequate to convey ambiance.

17. Methodology
● Crowdsourcing via Mechanical Turk
● 5 images – 2 from the Physical Environment image
corpus, and 3 from Random image corpus
● Tasks:
● Rank the images based on how informative they are of the
ambiance of a place
● Categorize the images in one of the four classes:
– Food/Drinks,
– People/Group,
– Physical Environment, and
– None of these.

18. Results
Images from Phy.Env.
corpus are in Top 2 ranks
91.7% for ambiance

19. Results
Images from Phy.Env.
corpus are in Top 2 ranks
91.7% for ambiance
96% of Phy. Env. Image corpus
describe the physical environment
67% Random image corpus describe
either food or people

20. Results
Phy. Env. image corpus describe the
physical environment in 96.2% of the cases
Random image corpus describe food items
or people in 67% of the cases
Finding from RQ1: Images with clear
views of the environment are perceived
as more suitable to characterize indoor
ambiance.

21. RQ2: Can the ambiance of an indoor place
be reliably assessed by observers of social
media images? If so, for what dimensions of
ambiance?

22. Methodology
● Crowdsourcing via Mechanical Turk
● Data: Phy. Env. Corpus 900 images across 300 places
● Ambiance Labels: 13 dimensions [Graham, 2011]
● Task: Rate personal impressions of the place ambiance along
13 dimensions on a 5-point Likert scale
● 10 annotations for each dimension per place → 3,000
responses.
[Graham 2011] L. T. Graham, & S. D. Gosling, “Can the ambiance of a place be determined by the user profiles of the
people who visit it?”. In the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2011

23. Artsy
Bohemian
Conservative
Creepy
Dingy
Formal
Sophisticated
Loud
Old Fashioned
Off the beaten path
Romantic
Trendy
Upscale
Ambiance
Labels

24. Inter-annotator Consensus
[0.8, 1.0)
[0.6, 0.8)
[0.0, 0.6)

25. ICCs across Cities
[0.8, 1.0) [0.6, 0.8) [0.0, 0.6)Color Legend

26. Ambiance across Cities – Correlation Analysis

27. Comparison between Cities
● Relatively few significant differences across cities
● Popular places in Seattle are perceived as less artsy compared to places in
Barcelona.
● Popular places in Paris are perceived as less old fashioned com-pared to NYC
and Seattle.

28. Comparison between Cities
● Popular places in Seattle are perceived as less artsy compared to
places in Barcelona.
● Popular places in Paris are perceived as less old fashioned com-
pared to NYC and Seattle.
Findings from RQ2:
Reliable estimates of ambiance can be obtained
using social media images, suggesting the
presence of visual cues to form place impressions.
Most aggregate impressions of ambiance are
similar across popular places in all cities

29. Future Work
● What specific cues are used to form place impressions?
● Color? Lighting? Spatial layout? Interior Design?
● Automatic recognition of ambiance
● Establishing links between visual cues and place
ambiance

30. Q & A
Email: dsantani@idiap.ch
Twitter: @SabMayaHai