Speakers
Description
“Reading Images, Writing Metadata” is an ongoing project by the Austrian National Library (ONB) which is aiming towards enriching metadata using various Computer Vision techniques, including AI models and Machine Learning, on a diverse collection of graphics and images.
The pictures and graphics available in the online portal ONB Digital are to be made more accessible through automatic object detection and classification, enhancing the general retrievability via search. The metadata generated hereby will be published and made available for other research applications in the future. Furthermore, images in the digitized book collection ABO (Austrian Books Online) and in ANNO (Austrian Newspapers Online) are to be identified and extracted using AI, which will expand the collection of items searchable. Digitized images with enriched metadata from object detection will enable users to find similar images. These different milestones will enable users to gain new approaches to the different collections of the ONB and foster serendipitous exploration as well as enhancing fundamental research on the use of digitized artworks in different contexts.
In a first and already completed step, various models and classification systems like ICONCLASS were tested on their robustness concerning the diversity of art styles and iconographic content in testing datasets. Even though these datasets do not contain artworks in the conventional sense of the word, the challenges faced by the team working on the project – such as depth(s) and degree(s) of description, the librarians’ expectations vs. the models’ capabilities, ontological borders between object detection and contextual classification, as well as implementation in (library) interfaces to ultimately benefit different user groups – are inherently transferable to other domains and therefore very suitable for a broader discussion with peers during this conference. The presentation will briefly explain the institutional background of the project to then focus on the main questions and decisions made so far, before finally giving an outlook on the tasks and challenges ahead.