Compensating for Scarce Historical Images in Cross-Domain Cultural Heritage Retrieval Using Synthetic Aging

📅 2026-09-08
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究通过合成老化图像来补充稀缺的历史图像,以改善跨域文化遗产检索。使用EfficientNetV2-M模型评估了真实与合成图像混合训练的效果。
📝 Abstract
Cultural heritage collections often contain contemporary and historical visual records of the same physical object. Linking these records is difficult because corresponding images may differ in viewpoint, acquisition conditions, color reproduction, framing, resolution, and degradation, while genuine historical images are frequently scarce. This study investigates whether synthetically aged contemporary images can replace or complement missing historical training data in bidirectional instance-level retrieval. Synthetic old-domain images are generated using degradation-oriented transformations. An EfficientNetV2-M model is evaluated on identity-disjoint training, validation, and test sets across three dataset partitions and three training seeds. Mixed real-synthetic training is compared with real-only baselines using proportionally scaled and fixed 300-batch-per-epoch schedules. Complete replacement of genuine historical images reduced bidirectional mean R@1 from 86.56% to 81.27%, showing that synthetic aging does not reproduce the full genuine old-domain variability. Increasing the number of independently generated synthetic variants provided no consistent improvement. Under controlled scarcity, however, synthetic completion improved mean R@1 by 3.69 percentage points at 25% genuine historical coverage and by 2.92 points at 50%, relative to the proportionally scaled real-only baselines. At 75%, the gain decreased to 2.00 points, while performance remained comparable to the complete-real-data reference. Fixed-schedule real-only controls did not reproduce these improvements. The results indicate that genuine and synthetic observations are complementary. Synthetic completion primarily benefits retrieval by extending cross-domain identity coverage rather than by increasing training exposure, with its contribution gradually decreasing as genuine historical coverage increases.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Cross-Domain Cultural Heritage Retrieval
Synthetic Aging
Historical Images
Scarce Data
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

synthetic aging
cross-domain retrieval
cultural heritage
mixed real-synthetic training
identity coverage
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M
Marcin Iwanowski
Inst. of Engineering and Technology, Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Informatics, Nicolaus Copernicus University, ul. Grudziądzka 5, 87-100 Toruń, POLAND; Institute of Control and Industrial Electronics, Warsaw University of Technology, ul. Koszykowa 75, 00-662 Warszawa, POLAND
A
Adam Mazgaj
Clemens, ul. Pawlikowskiego 10/2, 31-127 Kraków, POLAND
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Ferdynand Górski
Clemens, ul. Pawlikowskiego 10/2, 31-127 Kraków, POLAND
S
Sabina Szymoniak
Department of Computer Science, Czestochowa University of Technology, ul. Dąbrowskiego 69, 42-201 Częstochowa, POLAND