Heritage Iconographic Content Structuring: from Automatic Linking to Visual Validation

This article presents a global framework dedicated to the structuring of iconographic heritage collections. To alleviate the poor interlinking both between collections and contents, a first step of automatic linking exploiting content-based image retrieval approaches is evaluated and adapted to the visual variability of such heritage contents. To ensure understanding and analysis of the contents in a structured fashion, a 3D immersive web platform is also introduced alongside visual-based analysis tools. Finally, by exploiting both automatic linking and manual interventions in the visualization platform, an iterative, semi-automatic structuring pipeline is proposed to solve difficult cases missed by automatic structuring, and then improve structuring optimally. Here, we demonstrate the potential of the proposal on the geographic iconographic heritage of Paris, with a dataset of 10k images belonging to several institutions, thus poorly connected nor organized globally.