Welcome to MicroBeads!

General counting instructions and advice:

This page contains additional instructions and advices for MicroBeads' counting tasks. There are also a number of example images provided further below. 

- Beads may be malformed or discolored. There may be specks of dust or other debris. Use your best judgement in determining whether something is a bead or not.

- Beads may be stuck together forming clumps of two or more: do your best to figure out how many beads are in a clump.

- Our bead creation process is still under development. As such, you may find that beads are at times oddly shaped or discolored. Such beads should still be counted.

- Images will often contain no beads. Zero is an acceptable answer. You may even receive a task where none of the images have beads. 

- Similarly, we are still developing our optical systems: image quality will sometimes be poor. Do your best to estimate the number of beads in these images.

- At MicroBeads, we're new to Mechanical Turk. We do our best to provide clear instructions and to validate your tasks as quickly as possible. Please bear with us through any hiccups in our systems. 

- If you have questions or concerns, or need clarification on the tasks, please do not hesitate to reach out. 

Example Images:

Annotated Images:

These images contain varying numbers of beads. Each image is displayed opposite an annotated version where each bead is circled in red

Empty Images:

These are examples of images with no beads in them

Pathological Images:

These are examples of images with poor image quality or where the beads have fused into a clump. If you encounter images like this, simply make your best guess.

Bubble Images:

Sometimes our process creates bubbles. They are easily distinguished because they are much larger than beads. Do not count bubbles.