09:00 | Workshop opening |
| Invited talk |
09:10 | EuropeanaTech: Exploring the Future of Europeana Maarten Brinkerink Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, NetherlandsEuropeana is an innovative web portal that opens a doorway to the digital resources of Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collections. Visitors can discover, share in, re-use and be inspired by the rich diversity of Europe's cultural and scientific heritage. Books and manuscripts, photos and paintings, television and film, sculpture and crafts, sheet music and recordings and much more. From The Girl with the Pearl Earring, to Newton’s Laws of Motion, from the music of Mozart to the TV news of times gone by – you can find it all in Europeana (www.europeana.eu). Europeana has limited resources for development so the intelligent use of the wider, largely voluntary, communities of researchers and developers and other experts makes use of the collaborative nature of the web and creates strong buy in for Europeana’s sustainable future. The EuropeanaTech Research and Development community that has built up around Europeana fulfills an important role in this context. EuropeanaTech brings together a wide range of experts from the research elements of the Europeana network, and also seeks active collaboration with stakeholder groups outside the Europeana network. The mission of the EuropeanaTech community is to gather task forces on specific technical points (metadata display issues, extensions to the Europeana Data Model, etc) and foster a Europeana Software Developers Network. EuropeanaTECH was formally launched during the 2011 Europeana Network event. |
| Morning session 1 - Session Chair: Costantino Grana |
09:50 | Improving Ancient Roman Coin Classification by Fusing Exemplar-Based Classification and Legend Recognition Sebastian Zambanini, Albert Kavelar and Martin Kampel Computer Vision Lab, Vienna University of Technology, AustriaIn this paper we present an image-based classification method for ancient Roman Republican coins that uses multiple sources of information. Exemplar-based classification, which estimates the coins' visual similarity by means of a dense correspondence field, and lexicon-based legend recognition are unified to a common classification approach. Classification scores from both coin sides are further integrated to an overall score determining the final classification decision. Experiments carried out on a dataset of 60 different classes comprising 464 coin images show that the combination of methods leads to higher classification rate than using them separately. |
10:10 | An Early Framework for Determining Artistic Influence Kanako Abe, Babak Saleh and Ahmed Elgammal Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, USAConsidering the huge amount of art pieces that exist, there is valuable information to be discovered. Focusing on paintings as one kind of artistic creature that is printed on a surface, artists can determine its genre and the time period that paintings can belong to. In this work we are proposing the interesting problem of automatic influence determination between painters which has not been explored well. We answer the question ``Who influenced this artist?'' by looking at his masterpieces and comparing them to others. We pose this interesting question as a knowledge discovery problem. We presented a novel dataset of paintings for the interdisciplinary field of computer science and art and showed interesting results for the task of influence finding. |
10:30 | Stopwords Detection in Bag-of-Visual-Words: The Case of Retrieving Maya Hieroglyphs Edgar Roman-Rangel and Stephane Marchand-Maillet CVMLab, University of Geneva, SwitzerlandWe present a method for automatic detection of stopwords in visual vocabularies that is based upon the entropy of each visual word. We propose a specific formulation to compute the entropy as the core of this method, in which the probability density function of the visual words is marginalized over all visual classes, such that words with higher entropy can be considered to be irrelevant words, i.e., stopwords. We evaluate our method on a dataset of syllabic Maya hieroglyphs, which is of great interest for archaeologists, and that requires efficient techniques for indexing and retrieval. Our results show that our method produces shorter bag representations without hurting retrieval performance, and even improving it in some cases, which does not happen when using previous methods. Furthermore, our assumptions for the proposed computation of the entropy can be generalized to bag representations of different nature. |
10:50 | Coffee Break |
| Morning session 2 - Session Chair: Edgar Roman-Rangel |
11:20 | Reconstructing Archeological Vessels by Fusing Surface Markings and Border Anchor Points on Fragments Fernand Cohen, Zexi Liu and Zhongchuan Zhang Electrical and Computer Engineering, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USAThis paper presents a method to assist in the tedious process of reconstructing ceramic vessels from excavated fragments. The method exploits vessel surface marking information (models) supplied by the archaeologists along with anchor points on the fragment borders for reconstruction. Marking models are based on expert historical knowledge of the period, provenance of the artifact, and site location. The models need not to be identical to the original vessel, but must be within a geometric transformation of it in most of its parts. Marking matching is based on discrete weighted moments. We use anchor points on the fragment borders for the fragments with no markings. Corresponding anchors on different fragments are identified using absolute invariants, from which a rigid transformation is computed allowing the fragments to be virtually mended. For axially symmetric objects, a global constraint induced by the surface of revolution is applied to guarantee global mending consistency. |
11:40 | 3D Object Partial Matching using Panoramic Views Konstantinos Sfikas, Ioannis Pratikakis, Anestis Koutsoudis, Michalis Savelonas and Theoharis Theoharis ATHENA Research and Innovation Center, Xanthi, Greece - Democritus University of Thrace, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Xanthi, Greece - Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens, Greece -IDI, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), NorwayIn this paper, a methodology for 3D object partial matching and retrieval based on range image queries is presented. The proposed methodology addresses the retrieval of complete 3D objects based on artificially created range image queries which represent partial views. The core methodology relies upon Dense SIFT descriptors computed on panoramic views. Performance evaluation builds upon the standard measures and a challenging 3D pottery dataset originated from the Hampson Archeological Museum collection. |
12:00 | Using Various Types of Multimedia Resources to Train System for Automatic Transcription of Czech Historical Oral Archives Josef Chaloupka, Jan Nouza and Michaela Kucharova Institute of Information Technology and Electronics, Technical University of Liberec, Liberec, Czech RepublicHistorical spoken documents represent a unique segment of national cultural heritage. In order to disclose the large Czech Radio audio archive to research community and to public, we have been developing a system whose aim is to transcribe automatically the archive files, index them and make them searchable. The transcription of contemporary (1 or 2 decades old) documents is based on the lexicon and statistical language model (LM) built from a large amount of recent texts available in electronic form. From the older periods (before 1990), however, digital texts do not exist. Therefore, we needed a) to find resources that represent language of those times, b) to convert them from their original form to text, c) to utilize this text for creating epoch specific lexicons and LMs, and eventually, d) to apply them in the developed speech recognition system. In our case, the main resources included: scanned historical newspapers, shorthand notes from the national parliament and subtitles from retro TV programs. When converted into text, they allowed us to built a more appropriate lexicon and to produce a preliminary version of the transcriptions. These were reused for unsupervised retraining of the final LM. In this way, we significantly improved the accuracy of the automatically transcribed radio news broadcast in 1969-1989 era, from initial 83% to 88%. |
12:20 | Dealing with Bilingualism in Automatic Transcription of Historical Archive of Czech Radio Jan Nouza, Petr Cerva and Jan Silovsky Institute of Information Technology and Electronics, Technical University of Liberec, Liberec, Czech RepublicOne of the biggest challenges in the automatic transcription of the historical audio archive of Czech and Czechoslovak radio is bilingualism. Two closely related languages, Czech and Slovak, are mixed in many archive documents. Both were the official languages in former Czechoslovakia (1918-1992) and both were used in media. The two languages are considered similar, although they differ in more than 75% of their lexical inventories, which complicates automatic speech-to-text conversion. In this paper, we present and objectively measure the difference between the two languages. After that we propose a method suitable for automatic identification of two acoustically and lexically similar languages. It is based on employing 2 size-optimized parallel lexicons and language models. On large test data, we show that the 2 languages can be distinguished with almost 99% accuracy. Moreover, the language identification module can be easily incorporated into a 2-pass decoding scheme with almost negligible additional computation costs. The proposed method has been employed in the project aimed at the disclosure of Czech and Czechoslovak oral cultural heritage. |
12:40 | Automatic Single-Image People Segmentation and Removal for Cultural Heritage Imaging Marco Manfredi, Costantino Grana and Rita Cucchiara Universitŕ degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Modena, ItalyIn this paper, the problem of automatic people removal from digital photographs is addressed. Removing unintended people from a scene can be very useful to focus further steps of image analysis only on the object of interest. A supervised segmentation algorithm is presented and tested in several scenarios. |
13:00 | An Intellectual Journey in History : Preserving Indian Cultural Heritage Anupama Mallik, Santanu Chaudhury, T.B. Dinesh and Chalavaraju Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India - International Institute for Art, Culture and Democracy, Bengaluru, India - Kannada University, Hampi, IndiaHeritage preservation requires preserving the tangibles (monuments, sculpture, coinage, etc) and the intangibles (history, traditions, stories, dance, etc). Besides these artefacts, there is a huge amount of background knowledge that correlates all these resources and establishes their context. In this work, we present a new paradigm for heritage preservation -- `an Intellectual Journey into the past', which is more advanced than physical explorations of heritage sites and virtual explorations of monuments and museums. This paradigm proposes an experiential expedition into a historical era by using an ontology to inter-link the digital heritage artefacts with their background knowledge. A multimedia ontology encoded in the Multimedia Web Ontology Language (MOWL) is used to illustrate this paradigm by correlating the digital artefacts with their history as well their living context in today's world. The user experience of this paradigm involves a virtual traversal of a heritage site, with an ontology guided navigation through space and time and a dynamic display of different kinds of media. |
13:20 | Lunch Break |
| Afternoon session 1 - Session Chair: Jan Nouza |
14:30 | Passive profiling and natural interaction metaphors for personalized multimedia museum experiences Svebor Karaman, Andrew D. Bagdanov, Gianpaolo D'Amico, Lea Landucci, Andrea Ferracani, Daniele Pezzatini and Alberto Del Bimbo Media Integration and Communication Center (MICC), University of Florence, Florence, ItalyMuseums must balance the amount of information given on individual pieces or exhibitions in order to provide sufficient information to aid visitor understanding. At the same time they must avoid cluttering the environment and reducing the enjoyment of the exhibit. Moreover, each visitor has different interests and each might prefer more (or less) information on different artworks depending on their individual profile of interest. Finally, visiting a museum should not be a closed experience but a door opened onto a broader context of related artworks, authors, artistic trends, etc. In this paper we describe the MNEMOSYNE system that attempts to provide such a museum experience. Based on passive observation of visitors, the system builds a profile of the artworks of interest for each visitor. These profiles of interest are then used to personalize content delivery on an interactive table. The natural user interface on the interactive table uses the visitor's profile, a museum content ontology and a recommendation system to personalize the user's exploration of available multimedia content. At the end of their visit, the visitor can take home a personalized summary of their visit on a custom mobile application. In this article we describe each component of our approach as well as the first field trials of our prototype system built and deployed at our permanent exhibition space at Le Murate in the city of Florence. |
14:50 | Recommending Multimedia Objects in Cultural Heritage Applications Ilaria Bartolini, Vincenzo Moscato, Ruggero Pensa, Antonio Penta, Antonio Picariello, Carlo Sansone and Maria Luisa Sapino University of Bologna, DISI, Italy - University of Naples "Federico II", DIETI, Italy - University of Torino, DI, ItalyItaly's Cultural Heritage is the world's most diverse and rich patrimony and attracts millions of visitors every year to monuments, archaeological sites and museums. The valorization of cultural heritage represents nowadays one of the most important research challenges in the Italian scenario. In this paper, we present a general multimedia recommender system able to uniformly manage heterogeneous multimedia data and to provide context-aware recommendation techniques supporting intelligent multimedia services for the users. A specific application of our system within the cultural heritage domain is proposed by means of a real case study in the mobile environment related to an outdoor scenario, together with preliminary results on user's satisfaction. |
15:10 | Model-driven Generation of Collaborative Virtual Environments for Cultural Heritage Alberto Bucciero and Luca Mainetti National Council of Researches, Institute of Archaeological and Monumental Heritage, Rome, Italy - University of Salento, Department of Innovation Engineering, Lecce, ItalyCollaborative Virtual Environments are experiencing a large interest in cultural heritage field mostly due to the strong opportunity given by novel augmented reality applications. There are already several examples of collaborative augmented visit to museums or historical sites. Anyway the traditional and static approach to computer graphics is very limiting because it often requires the development of a Virtual Environment for every new application.In this paper, we propose a technique for model-driven generation of mixed re-ality virtual environments, where every modification in contents, visit path and in interactions with the physical surrounding environment don’t require a great re-coding effort, enabling fast deployment of collaborative virtual environments for cultural explorations only providing new contents and a small set of parameters. |
15:30 | Detection and Correction of Mistracking in Digitalized Analog Video Filippo Stanco, Dario Allegra and Filippo Luigi Maria Milotta Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, University of Catania, ItalyNowadays video technology is basically digital, but in the last half century the most diffused devices have been analog magnetic tapes. Since this is an old storing technique, it is necessary to convert these data in digital form. Moreover, analog videos may be affected by particular defects, called \emph{drops}. Despite there are many hardware to perform the digitalization, few implement the correction of drops. In this paper, the drop also known as ``Mistracking" is focused. A method to detect and correct this artifact is developed. |
15:50 | Coffee Break |
| Afternoon session 2 - Session Chair: Giuseppe Serra |
16:20 | Enhancing End User Access to Cultural Heritage Systems: Tailored Narratives and Human-Centered Computing Maristella Agosti, Marta Manfioletti, Nicola Orio and Chiara Ponchia Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Italy - Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Padua, ItalyThis paper reports on the results of a study that aims to support end users of a multimedia system that manages a digital cultural heritage collection. The system is provided with automatic tools that simulate the behavior of the research method adopted by professional users when they interact with the multimedia application. The experimental results have been obtained using a multimedia application that manages the digital representation of historical botanical manuscripts. |
16:40 | Modeling and visualization of drama heritage Vincenzo Lombardo and Antonio Pizzo University of Torino - Dip. Informatica - CIRMA, Italy - University of Torino - Dip. Studi Umanistici - CIRMA, ItalyThis paper presents a multimedia system for the modeling and visualization of drama heritage. The system consists of an ontology based annotation schema for the dramatic metadata of the cultural heritage artifacts (in textual or audiovisual form), a web--based platform for the introduction of the metadata, and a module for the visualization and exploration of such metadata. The system was tested on the cross--media studies of drama. |
17:00 | ‘A is for Art’ – My Drawings, Your Paintings Min Zhang, Sarah Atkinson, Natasha Alechina and Guoping Qiu University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UKThe booming development of digital technologies has significant effects on the way that human see and feel this world. The digitalization of artworks raises a set of interesting topics with the aim of making the artworks accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. In this paper, an Android Mobile App ‘A is for Art’ was developed to help the general public to find paintings using free-hand drawings, with the aim of involving more people with the Visual Art in an interesting way, particularly the paintings from the Tate Collection . A focus group for usability evaluation was conducted, and several design principles were drawn from the phases of development and evaluation. |
17:20 | Identifying Vandalized Regions in Facial Images of Statues for Inpainting Milind Padalkar, Manali Vora, Manjunath Joshi, Mukesh Zaveri and Mehul Raval Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar, India - Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, IndiaHistorical monuments are considered as one of the key aspects for modern communities. Unfortunately, due to a variety of factors the monuments get damaged. One may think of digitally undoing the damage to the monuments by inpainting, a process to fill-in missing regions in an image. A majority of inpainting techniques reported in the literature require manual selection of the regions to be inpainted. In this paper, we propose a novel method that automates the process of identifying the damage to visually dominant regions viz. eyes, nose and lips in face image of statues, for the purpose of inpainting. First, a bilateral symmetry based method is used to identify the eyes, nose and lips. Textons features are then extracted from each of these regions in a multi-resolution framework to characterize both the regular and irregular textures. These textons are matched with those extracted from a training set of true vandalized and non-vandalized regions, in order to classify the region under consideration. If the region is found to be vandalized, the best matching non-vandalized region from the training set is used to inpaint the identified region using the Poisson image editing method. Experiments conducted on face images of statues downloaded from the Internet, give promising results. |
17:40 | Workshop closing |