ITR: Advancing Digital Imagery Technologies for Asian Art and Cultural Heritages

This collaborative research project aims at advancing information

technologies related to the preservation, retrieval, and dissemination

of digital imagery for Asian art and cultural heritages. Researchers

in the US, China, and South Korea will collectively investigate and

develop technologies for acquiring, browsing, managing, and searching

large collections of high quality art images. This project will

contribute to the fundamental knowledge and technologies required to

create and maintain information systems that can operate in multiple

languages, formats, media, and social and organizational contexts.

The US research team will focus on (1) multimodal media management,

(2) distributed data mining, and (3) image storage and display. The team

will develop theoretical foundations to associate linguistic terms

with image features. The testbed databases of art images for this

research project consist of high quality scans, with metadata

information and detailed keyword information, as well as comprehensive

textual descriptions. The research work will show that (1) modern

machine learning and statistical data mining tools are capable of

learning from non-structured or semi-structured input data such as

human annotations, (2) statistical image modeling techniques can be

used in automatic linguistic indexing and concept dictionary building.

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