Medieval village sacral monuments in the Czech-Bavarian border region are an unjustly neglected part of the centuries-old cultural heritage of the region. A joint cross-border team consisting of scientists from the University of South Bohemia (USB) and the Technische Hochschule Deggendorf (THD) decided to change this fact and enlisted the help of artificial intelligence.
The project has created a specialised team with a historical-informatics focus, made up of students and researchers. The team of scientists is creating an information system to bring these monuments to the public. The system will contain textual and visual information about the individual monuments, which has not been available on the internet so far and will be freely accessible via the website. The system will bring to light the cultural and spiritual values that these monuments represent. The data collected from specialised literature will be partly automatically imported into Wikipedia, the most famous digital encyclopaedia of mankind, and published in an electronic publication translated into several world languages.
The team is also developing a deep-learning solution for processing and identifying photographs of these sacred objects. In addition to obtaining new information, the system can be used by ordinary users to identify objects and places in unfamiliar photographs. The group is creating a dataset that is quite unique in Europe and worldwide, which will allow the automatic recognition of individual details of the exterior and interior of a building (such as altars, statues, frescoes, pillars, vaulting, etc.) in submitted photographs. The dataset will then be used to develop mathematical models based on the implementation of deep neural networks that can identify details and objects in photographs with near-human accuracy. The user uploads a photo of the whole or some part of an unknown religious building via an intuitive web interface or mobile app, and the artificial intelligence decides which object and place it is.
The first results of the project have already been accepted for presentation at an international scientific conference.
Project data:
Project name: Information system for medieval monuments in the Czech-Bavarian border area, No 335
Grant programme: Cross-border cooperation programme Czech Republic – Free State of Bavaria Objective EÚS 2014–2020.
Czech partner: Institute of Applied Informatics of the Faculty of Science of the University of South Bohemia, which also secures cooperation with archaeologists, historians and art history experts.
Bavarian partner: Faculty of Applied Informatics of the Technische Hochschule Deggendorf (Freyung campus)
Total budget of both partners: EUR 558 383.23
Active period: 1/7/2021–31/12/2022
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