Design and Implementation of Deep Semantic Indexing on Digital Cultural Heritage Images

Abstract

With the rapid growth of information resources for cultural heritage images and the development ofDigital Humanities research, Deep Semantic Indexing (DSI), which aims at semantic indexing of culturalheritage images, has gradually attracted more and more attentions. DSI can improve not only theefficiency of image retrieval and acquisition, but also the user understanding of the images. It cansupport the integration of image resources and automatic knowledge discovery, which has importanttheoretical and practical significance. The study conducted throughout analysis of semantic featuresand themes of cultural heritage images and reviewed the existing cultural heritage metadata modelsand ontologies. Based on the understanding of the concept of DSI and its basic requirements, wedesigned the workflow and technological process of DSI, constructed the cultural heritage imagesemantic indexing model, including an inclusive concept model, an multi‐layered information model,and a structural model of the indexing texts. We also conducted an indexing experiment of theDunhuang mural “Nine‐colored Deer”. The DSI modeling of images reveals the semantic relationshipbetween concepts, images and text, mines the knowledge correlation between each information layer related to image indexing, and realizes the fine‐grained organization of image information units. At the same time, the indexing experiment verified the feasibility and scientificity of cultural heritage imageDSI structure. The design and implementation in DSI of cultural heritage image information is anadvancement of the deep semantic indexing theory and image information organization theory. Thedecision on image indexing’s granularity and extensibility should be based on the indexing contents.The integration of DSI information and the publishing of such information will be studied further in thefuture.

Keywords

• 文化遺產；深度語義標引；敦煌壁畫；信息建模；敘事性圖像