Analysis of Hand-drawn Maps of Places in Natural Disaster Pictures

Understanding the current situation of natural disaster damages is a critical step for an effective natural disaster responses, and many pictures uploaded after natural disasters are valuable resources for this purpose. However, many pictures are not associated with location information and it is not easy to connect the image content to locations on a map. There are two reasons for this difficulty. First, pictures are different in terms of directions and heights. Second, the situation of damaged areas in the picture may differ from before the natural disaster. Therefore, there is a mismatch between map fragments and the pictures taken after a disaster. This paper explores the potential of human computation to solve this problem. For this study, we asked people to draw a birds-eye view map of the place in a picture and compared the map with the correct map fragments to see the characteristics of such drawn maps.