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CODICES: Automatic Analysis of Mexican Codex Collections

English title CODICES: Automatic Analysis of Mexican Codex Collections
Applicant Gatica-Perez Daniel
Number 116702
Funding scheme Project funding (Div. I-III)
Research institution IDIAP Institut de Recherche
Institution of higher education Idiap Research Institute - IDIAP
Main discipline Information Technology
Start/End 01.08.2008 - 31.07.2012
Approved amount 178'128.00
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Keywords (13)

Image collections; mexican codices; content-based image retrieval; object modeling; categorization and matching; visual pattern discovery; computer vision; object representation; categorization; and matching; machine learning; mexican pictorial documents; cultural heritage

Lay Summary (English)

Lead
Lay summary
The preservation, analysis, and management of collections of valuable historical and cultural materials via digital imaging techniques is an emerging field significant to the society at large. The benefits of using visual and multimedia analysis techniques in this domain are manifold. Automatic content-based analysis methods can provide scholars in the humanities and the arts with tools to facilitate some of their more rutinary work - consulting, annotating, cataloging - but also to obtain new insights about specific theories through the recognition and discovery of patterns within and across pieces in a collection. Furthermore, these techniques can be used to create systems to access and retrieve digital versions of the materials, with the general public and education as the intended audience and goal, respectively. Finally, the automatic analysis is challenging, considering the nature of the media: complex content, limited amount of data, and degraded quality due to the effect of time. This domain thus constitutes an excellent testbed to develop robust analysis methods that can have general applicability to other media sources.

The project addresses the problem of analyzing digital imagery of cultural heritage materials through the development of new and principled analysis methods of wider applicability, integrating computer vision, information retrieval, and machine learning techniques. The project aims at advancing the state-of-the-art on representation, categorization, and matching of visual entities (for example, objects), and on discovery of salient visual patterns (visual data mining) in complex image collections, relying on robust invariant visual features and probabilistic models.

While the developed visual analysis methods aim at being generic, they will be showcased in a tool to support specialists' needs for a unique and challenging cultural heritage data source: the collection of ancient Mesoamerican pictorial documents from the National Anthropology and History Institute (INAH) in Mexico, which constitutes an invaluable source of information about the history, language, and beliefs of the indigenous cultures that inhabited Mexico before the Conquest of America. A fundamental research issue is the exploitation of prior domain knowledge and metadata, which will be investigated through a close collaboration with scholars at INAH. As a result, the project will join scientific research in the humanities, through the participation of archaeologists as a source of expertise and as users of the technology, and in computing, by targeting a challenging case for developing new methods for analysis of collections of visual information.
Direct link to Lay Summary Last update: 21.02.2013

Responsible applicant and co-applicants

Employees

Publications

Publication
Assessing Sparse Coding Methods for Contextual Shape Indexing of Maya Hieroglyphs
Roman-Rangel Edgar Francisco, Odobez Jean-Marc, Gatica-Perez Daniel (2012), Assessing Sparse Coding Methods for Contextual Shape Indexing of Maya Hieroglyphs, in Journal of Multimedia, Special Issue in Recent Achievements in Multimedia for Cultural Heritage, 7(2), 179-192.
Searching the Past: An Improved Shape Descriptor to Retrieve Maya Hieroglyphs
Roman-Rangel E., Pallan C., Odobez J.-M., Gatica-Perez D. (2011), Searching the Past: An Improved Shape Descriptor to Retrieve Maya Hieroglyphs, in ACM Int. Conf. on Multimedia, Proc. ACM Int. Conf. on Multimedia (ACM MM), Scottsdale, AZ, USA.
Analyzing Ancient Maya Glyph Collections with Contextual Shape Descriptors
Roman-Rangel E., Pallan C., Odobez J.-M., Gatica-Perez D. (2011), Analyzing Ancient Maya Glyph Collections with Contextual Shape Descriptors, in International Journal of Computer Vision, 94(1), 101-117.
New World, New Worlds: Visual Analysis of Pre-Columbian Pictorial Collections
Gatica-Perez D., Roman-Rangel E., Odobez J.-M., Pallan C. (2011), New World, New Worlds: Visual Analysis of Pre-Columbian Pictorial Collections, in Int. Workshop on Multimedia for Cultural Heritage , Proc. Int. Workshop on Multimedia for Cultural Heritage (MM4CH), Modena, Italy.
Retrieving Ancient Maya Glyphs with Shape Context
Roman-Rangel E., Pallan C., Odobez J.-M., Gatica-Perez D. (2009), Retrieving Ancient Maya Glyphs with Shape Context, in IEEE Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, Workshop on eHeritage and Digital Art Preservation, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, Workshop on eHeritage and Digital Art Preservation, Kyoto, Japan.

Communication with the public

Communication Title Media Place Year
Media relations: print media, online media Dechiffrer le passe avec du silicium SNSF Horizons Research Magazine German-speaking Switzerland Italian-speaking Switzerland Rhaeto-Romanic Switzerland International Western Switzerland 01.03.2010
Media relations: radio, television Le logiciel qui a du caractere Nuovo, Television Suisse Romande Western Switzerland 04.06.2010
Media relations: radio, television Les glyphes mayas Impatience, La 1ere, Radio Suisse Romande Western Switzerland 19.03.2010
Media relations: radio, television Mayan Script Euronews International 22.06.2010
Talks/events/exhibitions The CODICES project Western Switzerland 21.10.2009

Awards

Title Year
Idiap PhD Student Paper Award 2010 2010

Associated projects

Number Title Start Funding scheme
144238 MAAYA: Multimedia Analysis and Access for Documentation and Decipherment of Maya Epigraphy 01.05.2013 Interdisciplinary projects

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