This is a joint project between Idiap Research Institute and the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico (INAH, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia).
The aim of the project is to advance the state-of-the-art on robust representation, categorization and matching of visual patterns (appearance and shape), in complex images of cultural and historical collections, by developing probabilistic methods.
Although the developed methods will be general, robust approaches for these fundamental problems will eventually be integrated in tools to support and improve the job of archaeologists and other people who frequently manage these kind of image data bases.
The analysis is done over a photographic collection provided by the INAH, which contains thousands of inscriptions of the Maya culture from Mesoamerica. This collection, one of UNESCO’s Treasures of the World, features a considerable number of ancient pictorial documents and constitutes an invaluable source of information about the history, language, beliefs, and social structure of the indigenous cultures that inhabited Mexico before and soon after the conquest of America.
Overall, this project addresses the relevant problem of analyzing digital imagery of unique cultural heritage materials, through the development of new and principled analysis methods of wider applicability, integrating computer vision, information retrieval, and machine learning techniques.
An article about this project has been included in the 2010 Mars issue of the Horizons Magazine of the Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique (FNSNF). Article in French:
Listen to a radio interview about the project with my advisor Daniel Gatica-Perez and co-advisor Jean-Marc Odobez. The interview is in French. SORRY: by now the link is not available anymore, I will try to find it.
This is an interview for the Swiss Television (TSR). It contains details regarding to the interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeology and computer vision, as well as details about our work. The interview is in French. And the English version in Euronews.
Here is a demo in English showing how we retrieve Maya glyphs.
Aquí está la versión en Español mostrándo la búsqueda y regreso de glifos Mayas.