The professor gave a lecture titled "Intelligent Application of Cultural Heritage Images - Making the Value of Images Visible" around how to make images a living resource and how to deeply mine the value of images. "System" (MISS platform), let us explore the intelligent application of cultural heritage images, lock the charm of culture in the images, and touch the beauty of technology in the interaction. My study notes are organized around the five parts of the development background, technical framework, intelligent system, design concept and development trend of the intelligent application of cultural heritage images explained by the teacher.
1. The concept of cultural heritage
Cultural heritage is the wealth left to mankind by history. From the form of existence, it is divided into tangible cultural heritage (tangible cultural heritage) and intangible cultural heritage (intangible cultural heritage). Cultural heritage refers to cultural relics with historical, artistic and scientific value; intangible cultural heritage refers to various traditional cultures that exist in intangible form, are closely related to people's lives and are inherited from generation to generation.
In the construction of digital humanities, different resource repositories and platforms use independent technical frameworks, resource formats and applications, and there are obstacles in resource sharing among different institutions. Under the background of intelligent application of digital humanities and cultural heritage images, the realization of text recognition, graphic recognition, version comparison, feature extraction, spectral analysis and other applications in cultural heritage, books, cultural relics, and collections can drive innovation in humanities and arts research. . Digital humanities has gradually become an academic fashion, but it is precisely because of the blessing of technology that the changes and leaps in digital humanities have been promoted.
2. International Image Interoperability Framework IIIF
With the development of Internet technology and the advent of the data age, the scattered knowledge culture has unprecedented connections due to network dissemination, and people can break through the geographical barriers for cultural integration. The frequent interaction of this kind of culture has greatly accelerated the process of social civilization, and at the same time, new demands have been continuously generated in the process of cultural integration. As a non-textual data resource, digital image media has received unprecedented attention from the art and education circles because of its rich expression, profound cultural connotation, cross-temporal communication and sharing, and multiple abstract metaphors. However, at present, most of the image resources have been digitized and scattered in the archives of various countries, which are difficult to be rediscovered, utilized, converted, and compared, gradually forming image "islands".
Based on this background, the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) was jointly established in June 2015 by 29 non-profit image resource storage institutions including the British Library, Oxford University Library, and Harvard University to define the A set of standardized resource transfer interfaces (APIs) to promote the exchange and sharing of image resources between heterogeneous platforms and resource libraries, aiming at ensuring the interoperability and accessibility of global image storage, and for books and maps based on images. , scrolls, manuscripts, scores, archives and other online resources for unified display and use.
After the institution adopts IIIF technology, it can break through the limitation of its own resources, fully realize the interoperability of image resources with other collection institutions, and greatly improve the research ability in the network data environment. In general, IIIF is not a platform or system, but defines a set of "standards" for interaction.
IIIF has been in existence since 2016. There are limited products in this field in the world, but the overall development trend data is considerable. According to the data released by the IIIF official website in April 2019, the number of global images that meet the IIIF standard has reached about 1 billion. These digitized images are concentrated in major libraries, museums, archives and cultural heritage institutions around the world. There are two categories of IIIF-related applications: image servers and image browsers. At present, a number of browsers that support IIIF have been developed on the IIIF official website. Most of the products are open source, some are specially developed for IIIF, and some are improvements to existing browsers. These image browsers have different functional emphasis and interaction methods, and have different characteristics according to the demands of current viewers. At present, the browsers developed by the following institutions are more in-depth and relatively complete.
One of them is the tool "Mirador 3" that the teacher highlighted. Mirador is an image browser developed by Stanford University. It is a relatively mature product in IIIF resources. It has been developed to the third version. It is a specialized tool for open sharing of high-definition image resources using visual operation tools. Since the browser is open source software, Harvard has made improvements. It uses a graphical interface with the following features: deep zooming and panning of high-resolution images, the ability to view and navigate multi-image objects (such as books and manuscripts) using thumbnails and catalogs, and the ability to display annotations for image areas. The key improvements and new features of Mirador are the preset usage habits of image browser users in different usage scenarios. For example, it can fit image windows into adjacent spaces, and users can move the windows to any position in the expandable workspace, even overlapping; it will be very beneficial for users to do image comparison research. Moreover, Mirador allows users to customize the appearance according to the purpose of use, and the flexible design makes it have a wide audience.
At present, libraries, art galleries, museums, archives and other institutions all over our country have begun to establish large-scale digital image resource databases. Different from the way of using text resources in the past, these digital image resources have emerged in the process of opening and sharing. Brand new sharing mode. Therefore, it is imperative to study the graphical operation interface of IIIF technology, which makes better use of my country's image resources and builds a bridge between users and my country's precious and splendid historical materials.
Finally, the teacher also mentioned that the IIIF framework has brought new thinking directions and research modes to the utilization of image resources. Based on IIIF, linked data, semantic web and other frameworks and technologies, they have developed a multi-dimensional image intelligence system (MISS) platform that serves as an infrastructure for digital humanities image research. The MISS platform provides the management, reuse, curation, annotation, sharing and other application ecosystems of image resources in a one-stop way, and supports online research on ultra-clear and super-large images.
3. Personal Summary
Driven by the development of NFT (Non-Fungible Token), computer vision, A/V/3D and other fields, the field of cultural heritage image intelligence application will surely burst out with new vitality and vitality. The teacher's lecture will apply theoretical techniques and practical applications Ingenious combination, so that the majority of teachers and students benefit a lot. Under the blessing of these new technologies for intelligent application of cultural heritage images, the development and utilization of other resources such as audio and video will become much more convenient in the future. Finally, I would like to thank the teacher for sharing about IIIF. I believe that in the future, more people will pay attention to and devote themselves to the study and research in the field of cultural heritage image intelligence.