The National Library of Estonia organised on 21 October 2021 the Digital Memory 2021, a full-day online event with the aim of introducing innovative projects that use AI for the benefit of cultural heritage. The webinar was held in English and looked into the future potential that AI could offer for cultural heritage and the digital future of memory institutions as a whole.
Eleftheria Tsoupra, Technical Analyst from the Europeana Foundation, introduced the Saint George on a Bike project, its main goals, the data covered and used in the project, and the process for detection of cultural objects in images. In addition, she also explained how SGoaB has been experimenting with Bounding Box analysis and Natural Language Processing technologies (BERT) in order to generate image captions for cultural heritage images.
On the other hand, the challenges of the project were also presented. Specifically, she highlighted the unavailability of accurate and appropriate data for training since there is still a small amount of appropriately annotated images and their descriptions do not usually focus on the visual content of the images. Therefore, quite a lot of manual labor is needed to annotate the images. Finally, she presented the crowdsourcing campaign SGoaB is currently carrying out in order to obtain alternative sources of annotated cultural heritage images.
During the event, more initiatives were introduced to show how the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning had already transformed the cultural heritage sector.
Watch the full event (SGoaB’s presentation is at minute 3:03:22):
