Computer Vision at Arcanum

Images and photos greatly enhance the quality of any article, blog post, or research essay.  The need for such a service led us to develop our image search engine that heavily relies on artificial intelligence.

In this article, we present the computer vision technology in Arcanum and how it helps our users.

Face detection

Based on our user’s feedback, we’ve noticed that most of the searches target persons. Advanced convolutional neural networks 2 can recognize and mark human faces on digital images. Arcanum’s Face filter under the Illustrations category uses one of these algorithms: Arcanum Newspapers can list only those pages on which the AI detects a human face.

Our next example shows how to find photos of the world-famous Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály. Type in the name, then click the checkbox to enable the Face filter under Illustrations .

Face search from a file

The technology we presented here enabled us to collect millions of images of human faces from our database of digitized publications. We made this database available to our subscribers: once a face photo is uploaded, the algorithm analyses the features of the face, then it compares to other faces in the database.

The enhanced AI can find photos of the same person in her younger or older ages, even in low-quality digitized prints. Clicking on an image opens the page in the reader view from where you can read the whole issue. We hope our service can help find exciting stories of a distant relative or friend in an old family photo. Face search can also be a tool for researchers, scholars, and journalists when collecting creditable sources on famous personalities.

In our next example, we uploaded a photo of the world-famous Hungarian football player, Ferenc Puskás, which depicts him in his fifties. The AI recognized the unique features of his face, then it listed similar images. Note that the system lists photos of different ages and body shapes.

Read more on the face recognition in this study by Amazon:

Arcanum makes Hungarian heritage accessible with Amazon Rekognition
by Sinisa Mikasinovic and Cameron Peron | on 23 OCT 2020

*: Learn more about the ResNet classification algorithm on this page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual_neural_network
** : Read more on the Single Shot MultiBox Detector algorithm here.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02325z