Crowdsourcing quality control for Dark Energy Survey images
Abstract
We have developed a crowdsourcing web application for image quality control employed by the Dark Energy Survey. Dubbed the "DES exposure checker", it renders science-grade images directly to a web browser and allows users to mark problematic features from a set of predefined classes. Users can also generate custom labels and thus help identify previously unknown problem classes. User reports are fed back to hardware and software experts to help mitigate and eliminate recognized issues. We report on the implementation of the application and our experience with its over 100 users, the majority of which are professional or prospective astronomers but not data management experts. We discuss aspects of user training and engagement, and demonstrate how problem reports have been pivotal to rapidly correct artifacts which would likely have been too subtle or infrequent to be recognized otherwise. We conclude with a number of important lessons learned, suggest possible improvements, and recommend this collective exploratory approach for future astronomical surveys or other extensive data sets with a sufficiently large user base. We also release open-source code of the web application and host an online demo version at http://des-exp-checker.pmelchior.net
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1511.03391,
title = {Crowdsourcing quality control for Dark Energy Survey images},
author = {P. Melchior and E. Sheldon and A. Drlica-Wagner and E. S. Rykoff and T. M. C. Abbott and F. B. Abdalla and S. Allam and A. Benoit-Levy and D. Brooks and E. Buckley-Geer and A. Carnero Rosell and M. Carrasco Kind and J. Carretero and M. Crocce and C. B. D'Andrea and L. N. da Costa and S. Desai and P. Doel and A. E. Evrard and D. A. Finley and B. Flaugher and J. Frieman and E. Gaztanaga and D. W. Gerdes and D. Gruen and R. A. Gruendl and K. Honscheid and D. J. James and M. Jarvis and K. Kuehn and T. S. Li and M. A. G. Maia and M. March and J. L. Marshall and B. Nord and R. Ogando and A. A. Plazas and A. K. Romer and E. Sanchez and V. Scarpine and I. Sevilla-Noarbe and R. C. Smith and M. Soares-Santos and E. Suchyta and M. E. C. Swanson and G. Tarle and V. Vikram and A. R. Walker and W. Wester and Y. Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.03391},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
12 pages, 7 figures, accepted by Astronomy & Computing