ICARUS Lecture #3: Experiments with object & facial recognition on historic photos

On November 17th, Sven Lepa from National Archives of Estonia, gave ICARUS Online Lecture #3 on the intriguing topic “Experiments with object and facial recognition on historic photos of the National Archives of Estonia”.

National Archives of Estonia.

Sven introduced the audience to the technical development and results of an in-house project of National Archives of Estonia, testing object recognition algorithms on photographic collections. The project allowed the archival staff to have a different view on its photographic funds, which might enrich archival descriptions.

Object recognition.

The project also developed Ilme  https://www.ra.ee/ilme/web/en  – a search tool based on face recognition algorithms, allowing users to compare their own pictures with over half a million photos held by the Archives. Due to the peculiarities of the Archive’s photo collection, results of facial recognition might be deceiving for a broader public, but it gave some interesting outcome, identifying people who were not recognized until now.

Sven Lepa stressed the Archive’s interest in further technical developments on its search tool, the willingness to cooperate with GLAM institutions and the possibility to start a crowdsourced project on object recognition.

The session was being held in English and is available on ICARUS YouTube channel!
More information: sven.lepa@ra.ee

Photo Database.

Next ICARUS Online event will take place on December 17th. Daniel Jeller will present the NAMPI Project – Nuns and Monks – Prosopographical Interfaces (NAMPI)

Stay tuned for more ICARUS Online lectures!