PROTECTING CULTURAL HERITAGE
IN TIMES OF CONFLICT
Framing meeting
Académie Diplomatique Internationale
Paris, le 27 Mai 2013
The ProCulture Project
Le Projet pour Protéger le Patrimoine Culturel
- using technology to protect cultural heritage objects
from looting and to facilitate their recovery
David Shotton
Oxford e-Research Centre
University of Oxford, UK
e-mail: david.shotton@oerc.ox.ac.uk
© David Shotton, 2013
Published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Licence
Interpol recovers stolen art treasure

This head of King Sanatruq I of Hatra, dating from 2nd
century AD, was looted from the National Museum of
Iraq in Baghdad, among 15,000 other looted items

A leading Italian archaeologist from the University of
Turin, who had participated in the archaeological dig in
Hatra, recognised the sculpture in an Al Jazeera
television report broadcast in June 2006

The archaeologist informed Interpol, and was able to provide documentation
which contained the inventory number assigned to the statue by the Iraq Museum

This looted object was then retrieved by Interpol in April 2007 from the home of a
well-known Lebanese decorator, who had featured in the Al Jazeera documentary

This example demonstrates the importance of images and of documentation in the
recovery of looted cultural heritage objects

In the ProCulture Project, we will preemptively use state-of-the-art image matching
and semantic documentation techniques to record at-risk cultural heritage objects,
so that they might later be identified if looted and offered for sale elsewhere
Protecting cultural heritage objects – the ProCulture Project

Local museum curators in high-risk
areas photograph each object using a
mobile phone
 Metadata include date and GPS

They also photograph any associated
documentation or catalogue information

They upload these photos to the
ProCulture Database, keeping copies

We will store and index the images

We will perform OCR (optical character
recognition) to convert images of textual
documentation to processable text

We will mine the text for relevant
documentary information, and will record
it in a structured searchable manner

If, after looting, an object of
doubtful provenance turns up in a
Paris auction room, a photograph
of it can be taken and used to
search the ProCulture Database
Image matching using ‘Visual Google’

Developed by Professor Andrew Zisserman, Oxford University

Employs state-of-the-art image processing technology

Uses an image (in this case of part of photo of a sculpture)
to search for similar images in a database of images
Visual Google retrieves the
original image (top) and
three related images of
the same object
How it works – searching for ‘visual words’

An image

. . . . . is a bag of ‘visual words’

Visual Google searches for other images containing the same ‘visual words’,
just as Google searches for web pages containing textual search terms
. . . it works!
Search
The same visual word
Find
Another example – an image on a broken pot

Processing is rapid and fully automatic

The search results are unaffected by
magnification, contrast, colour and image rotation
Another example, this time based on shape

Search image: Henry Moore’s Oval with Points

From this image, generate boundary descriptors
that are also used in searches as ‘visual words’

Retrieved images (from Flickr):
 Same shape, different instances,
different materials, different sizes
The importance of documentation - Rodin’s sculpture of Balzac

In 1891, le Société des Gens des Lettres
commissioned Auguste Rodin to create a
statue to honour the great French writer
Honoré de Balzac

Rodin finally created the statue in plaster in
1897, but it drew hostile criticism

The statue was never cast in bronze until
after Rodin’s death in 1917

It is now regarded as one of his finest and
most iconic works

I wondered how many ‘Balzac’s’ exist?
Other instances of ‘Balzac’ that I found
In the garden of
Hôtel Biron, Paris
Norton Simon
Museum,
Pasadena,
California
Rue Montparnasse
Hakone Open
Air Museum,
Japan
Event-centric documentation for Balzac’s sculpture
Commission from Le Société
des Gens des Lettres, 1891
Auguste Rodin
(1840 - 1917)
The writer Honoré
de Balzac
Creative act
of sculpture
[1897, Paris]
Plaster version
of ‘Balzac’
Rudier et Fils
Casting [1939, Paris]
Bronze casting of
‘Balzac’, edition of 12
Cast #8 at the Norton Simon
Museum, Pasadena, Ca.
Event-centric documentation for King Sanatruq’s bust
King Sanatruq
(140-180 AD)
Unknown sculptor
(Kingdom of Hatra)
Creative act
of sculpture
[~178 AD]
Limestone bust of
King Sanatruq
Centro Scavi di
Torino in Iraq
Excavation and
[1963 - , Hatra] re-discovery
Museum
curators
Display in National
Museum of Iraq
Archeological inventory and
provenance information
Museum catalogue
information
Relationship to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme
Clearly, our vision is similar to that of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme
 “The vision of the Memory of the World Programme is that the world's
documentary heritage belongs to all, should be fully preserved and
protected for all and, with due recognition of cultural mores and
practicalities, should be permanently accessible to all without hindrance”
The ProCulture Project differs, however, in the following ways:

It focuses on physical objects of all sorts, not just documents

It is specifically designed to protect against looting and theft in high-risk areas

The technology used to photograph the objects and their documentation is
deliberately easy, cheap, low-tech and universal – the mobile phone

It is behind the scenes that sophisticated technology is employed, both for
image matching and semantic description, to facilitate subsequent recovery
 The latter will use the event-centric CIDOC-CRM data model developed
specifically for describing cultural heritage objects, and will encode the
data using RDF, the format used for linked data sharing on the Web
The cultural heritage of Mali under threat

Centre de Recherches Historiques
Ahmed Baba, Tombouctou

Home to ~23,000 Islamic
religious, historical and scientific
texts from all over the world

The oldest manuscripts date from
the 12th century

In January 2013, the library was
burned by retreating insurgents

(However, the bulk of the
manuscripts had been removed
and hidden, and are undamaged)

Here, specifically, the ProCulture Project has much in common with the
UNESCO Memory of the World Timbuktu Manuscripts Project, and can help
by enabling ‘quick and dirty’ documentation, in advance of professional highresolution scanning which can be slow and expensive
end