Victor De Boer
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6 records found
1
Computer vision and architectural history at eye level
Mixed methods for linking research in the humanities and in information technology (ArchiMediaL)
Information on the history of architecture is embedded in our daily surroundings, in vernacular and heritage buildings and in physical objects, photographs and plans. Historians study these tangible and intangible artefacts and the communities that built and used them. Thus valuable insights are gained into the past and the present as they also provide a foundation for designing the future. Given that our understanding of the past is limited by the inadequate availability of data, the article demonstrates that advanced computer tools can help gain more and well-linked data from the past. Computer vision can make a decisive contribution to the identification of image content in historical photographs. This application is particularly interesting for architectural history, where visual sources play an essential role in understanding the built environment of the past, yet lack of reliable metadata often hinders the use of materials. The automated recognition contributes to making a variety of image sources usable for research.
We address the interpretability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for predicting a geo-location from an image. In a pilot experiment we classify images of Pittsburgh vs Tokyo and visualize the learned CNN filters. We found that varying the CNN architecture leads to variating in the visualized filters. This calls for further investigation of the effective parameters on the interpretability of CNNs.