=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1352/paper9
|storemode=property
|title=CultureCam: Exploring Europeana Images to Inspire Creative Design
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1352/paper9.pdf
|volume=Vol-1352
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/iui/GordeaMH15
}}
==CultureCam: Exploring Europeana Images to Inspire Creative Design==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1352/paper9.pdf
CultureCam: Exploring Europeana Images to Inspire
Creative Design
Sergiu Gordea Sanna Martilla Christina Holm
AIT-Austrian Institute of Aalto University Spild af Tid
Technology GmbH Miestentie 3 Copenhagen, Denmark
Donau-City-Strasse 1 Helsinki, Finland @spildaftid.dk
.@aalto.fi
1220, Vienna, Austria
.@ait.ac.at
ABSTRACT the task at hand. Often in their work, the designers are using
This paper presents an online tool that offers designers, copper wires, paper forms or existing objects to sketch or
artists and all creative people, the possibility of exploring model new artifacts. They produce several versions of their
and accessing Europeana in a funny, playful and intuitive designs until the desired work is created. The Europeana
way. By using the webcam to take a photo of any object or artifacts have a great potential to help and inspire designers
texture, users can invoke the Culture Cam tool for accessing in their daily work; however, their concrete requirements
a set of images that are similar in color, shape or pattern. It are hard to be described in words and the classic text-based
is used to stimulate the inspiration of creative designers by search engines are often not able to satisfy them. From
diving into common cultural heritage and providing access designer’s point of view, accessing inspiring and reusable
to beautiful content available to be used as source for new content through Europeana portal2 is a complex and time
derivative designs and art artefacts. The collection of items consuming task.
used by Culture Cam are accessible under public domain The main motivation behind the development of Culture-
licence. Cam is the need to address content accessibility issues syn-
thesized within the following questions:
Keywords • How to access and reuse Europeana content in an in-
Creative Design, Image Similarity Search, Cultural Heritage teractive and playful way?
1. INTRODUCTION • What kind of content can I find in Europeana?
The European digital library aggregates information from
• How can one find object with particular visual charac-
cultural heritage institutions from the whole old continent.
teristics?
Among those, there are more than 23 million images rep-
resenting for example traditional or modern artwork, pho-
• How to get motivated for exploring more image con-
tographs of buildings and landscapes, scans of biodiversity
tent?
material or images from old manuscripts1 .
The aim of the CultureCam application is to connect the
digital cultural heritage made available by Europeana to • How to access inspirational content for creative reuse?
the open communities of craft and media designers. The
In order to address these challenges, CultureCam employs
designers may use cultural heritage objects as sources for
the search by example approach and interactive browsing of
new derivative designs such as embroidery, textile patterns,
a curated dataset. With the assistance of professional de-
3D printed objects, media art, etc. However, there are im-
signers we selected a set of reusable images from the featured
portant constraints with regard to the reusability of digital
collections in Europeana Labs3 , which is accessible through
content in new designs. The primary concerns are related
CultureCam, both from desktop an mobile devices.
to the copyright protection and the quality of the content.
The rest of the the paper describes the steps followed to
While Europeana has made efforts to assign usage rights to
implement the CultureCam application and is organized as
all objects, only a small part of them are freely available
follows: Section 2 places the current work within the related
for reuse. From the reusable ones, some do not present ob-
research context of the cultural heritage domain. The ar-
jects that raise the interest of creative designers. Typically,
chitecture and the process of building the CultureCam pro-
they are only interested to use fascinating shapes, patterns
totype and the image processing and search functionality is
and/or color-rich content.
described in Section 3, while the graphical user interface is
The second challenge is related to the provision of efficient
presented in Section 4 followed by the discussion of weak-
and effective ways for accessing inspiring images relevant for
nesses and open issues in Section 5. The conclusion and
1
http://europeana.eu/portal/search.html?query= directions for future work are summarized in the final part
TYPE:IMAGE&rows=24 of the paper.
PATCH @IUI 2015 2
see http://www.europeana.eu/portal
Copyright held by the authors. 3
http://labs.europeana.eu/data/
2. RELATED WORK From the user perspective, CultureCam is a digital “live”
The work presented in this paper is carried out within tool that facilitates the access to images containing similar
the scope of Europeana Creative4 project. The project fol- colors, shapes and patterns by using a web camera. One may
lows a co-creation approach for developing five pilot applica- take a snapshot of an object in front of his/hers computer or
tions empowered by the cultural heritage content accessible mobile device and submit it to Culture Cam, which analyzes
through Europeana. A similar approach was employed for the given picture and comes up with a result set of similar
the development of the CoDICE (COdesigning DIgital Cul- content.
tural Encounters) tool, as reported by Diaz et al in [2]. This Figure 1 presents the architecture of the proposed system,
has the goal to support co-designing activities for building which allows end users to use their favorite mobile devices
smart objects for enhanced encounters with cultural her- (phones or tablets) or computers (notebooks or desktops)
itage. The key functionalities of this tool are related to the for accessing the frontend (web) application. The interactive
management and tracking co-design activities, enhancement access and browsing of images is empowered by the search
and documentation of design products. functionality provided by the backend service in charge of
An important issue related to the reuse of cultural her- managing the image index.
itage content in creative designs is caused by the copyright
restrictions. Many of the digitized cultural objects are not
freely reusable or they are available in low quality. Mar-
tilla and Hyyppä show how copyrights become a driver of
the design process and override goals of human-centered and
participatory design [4]. Rights clearance is extremely hard
in the case of audio-visual content. However, in the case
of image content, the identification of right owners is less Figure 2: Content selection and indexing process
complicated, and the rights statements are available in the
metadata of Europeana objects. Still, less than ten percent The process of selecting and indexing appropriate mate-
of image content is marked as public domain, and most of it rials for being reused by designers is not a straight-forward
doesn’t present much value for designers (i.e. large part of one. The approach used for accomplishing this goal is pre-
public domain content are grayscale photographs of regular sented in Figure 2, following a three-step workflow. In the
landscapes, persons or objects). first step, a manual pre-selection of available collections and
The core of the image similarity search engine used in this items is performed. This makes use of expert knowledge
paper was described by Amato et al in [1]. A preliminary to search content basing on existing metadata followed by
evaluation of the service using a controlled dataset selected a brief visual inspection of the given selection. For the
from Europeana was presented in [3]. The previous work CultureCam prototype we primarily investigated collections
aimed at evaluating to which extent the search engine may containing public domain content, which are available also
satisfy the expectations of the regular users or creative de- with good resolution and a wide variation of colors, patterns
sign professionals. In contrast to the previous work, the and shapes. The visual inspection is made directly within
CultureCam dataset aggregates items with a large variation the Europeana Portal 5 . In the second step, the targeted im-
of objects, patterns and shapes. There are only a few images ages are accessed through the Europeana API 6 , the image
being very close to each example in terms of visual similarity. features are extracted and images that doesn’t pass a certain
level of quality are filtered out (including placeholders, small
resolution, grayscale or monochromatic images). Finally, the
3. CULTURECAM PROTOTYPE images are evaluated by their visual features and placed in
The main goal of the Culture Cam prototype is to pro- an image index. A nearest neighborhood algorithm is used
vide easy and intuitive access to cultural heritage content here for reducing the search space and improve the execu-
for designer communities. Therefore, the design goal of the tion performance at runtime. This is achieved by selecting
application is to provide an simple and intuitive mechanism a so called pivot set and computing the distances between
for accessing image content, based on a word free search and each image and each pivot. At runtime, the search results
a tactile interaction with the GUI. It invites the designers are ordered by their similarity relative to the pivot set. A
to take a closer look into Europeana content by facilitating detailed description of the feature extraction and indexing
easy access to the archive through provision of inspirational process is available in [1].
and “unexpected” search results. Therefore, the search mod-
ule makes a tradeoff between the similarity and serendipity 4. GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE
of the retrieved image content.
Due to the complexity of accessing and browsing the Euro-
peana repository, a clear goal of Culture Cam is to make the
interaction with the graphical user interface as simple intu-
itive and engaging as possible. Consequently, the graphical
user interface is remarkably simple, the number of interac-
tion possibilities and features in the tool being reduced to
a minimum. The understated design aims to create a sub-
tle frame for accessing beautiful Europeana content, high-
Figure 1: System Architecture lighting images and thus presenting the search result as nice
5
see http://www.europeana.eu/portal/
4 6
http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-creative see http://labs.europeana.eu/api/
gallery pages. Additionally, it has been the intention all the scalable or repeatable/reproducible process. Therefore, we
way through to keep the user journey short. There are no employed several heuristics for semi-automatic content selec-
conventional menu/sub menus structures except from the tion by using the resolution, color distributions and shape
menu icon, borrowed from the iPhone interface with the descriptions in order to identify the most interesting content
clear purpose of creating a simple, intuitive and “familiar” items. Another important policy in the content selection
user interface. process was introduced by the need of including only con-
tent that is freely reusable for design purposes. Currently
we only included public domain8 content, in the next ver-
sions we plan to include also images released under the CC09
license.
Capturing photos with the webcams integrated in com-
puters or mobile devices is the core functionality of the Cul-
tureCam prototype. Webcams are available in the great
majority of notebooks and mobile phones, however, their
heterogeneity is transposed in the technical and visual char-
acteristics of the captured photos. In the most of the cases,
Figure 3: GUI: Capture and search screen the images are not captured under optimal illumination con-
ditions and as a consequence they are undersaturated, grainy
The first screen of the application invites the user to cap- or dark. In contrast, the Europeana images are created by
ture a photo that will automatically trigger a search in the scanning with professional devices. Often, the objects are
image repository as shown in Figure 3. Therefore, the GUI placed on background surfaces of different colors. An addi-
uses no more than three control elements for taking the pic- tional step for processing the input images might be imple-
ture and for back and forth navigation through the search mented in the future to overcame the systematic differences
results. Recently, new functionality for sharing the links to between the captured images and Europeana content and
the current search results on Facebook and Twitter has been thus, further improve the search results.
added to this screen. The latest version of the CultureCam
can be accessed on the official website7 . 6. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
This paper presents a tool that makes the visual navi-
gation through the selected image content available in Eu-
ropeana as simple and intuitive as possible. The current
version of the CultureCam uses a collection of 2600 items,
that were curated to be freely reusable and also inspiring for
creative designers. When being focused on simplifying the
browsing and stimulating the interest for cultural heritage
items, the search algorithm was designed to make a trade-
off between the similarity of the retrieved results and their
serendipity. At the submission date, the CultureCam tool
is in an pre-release version. Future work will investigate the
possibility to provide access to whole image content of Eu-
ropeana and to evaluate the acceptance of the CultureCam
Figure 4: GUI: View results and search screen application within the designer communities.
When users choose to take a close look at an image re- 7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
trieved from the Europeana repository, four more controls This work was partially funded by the EuropeanaCreative
are displayed. One of them is used to display basic metadata project, co-funded by the Commission of the European Com-
of the image (i.e. title, rights, provider) and another repre- munities under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT
sents the direct link to Europeana page providing complete PSP). This publication reflects only the authors’ views and
information about the given image. The other two possibil- the European Union is not liable for any use that might be
ities are to go back and take a new picture or dig further made of information contained therein.
into Europeana content by searching similars to the current
selection. 8. REFERENCES
[1] G. Amato, P. Bolettieri, F. Falchi, C. Gennaro, and
5. OPEN ISSUES F. Rabitti. Combining local and global visual feature
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dependent on the quality and the amount of content made 49–54, 2011.
exposed thought its image search service. Selecting the ap- [2] P. Dı́az, I. Aedo, and J. Cubas. Codice: Balancing
propriate items for being included in the CultureCam collec- software engineering and creativity in the co-design of
tion is a complex process, as described in Section 3. Manual digital encounters with cultural heritage. In Proceedings
curation is not an option when the size of the collection in- of the 2014 International Working Conference on
creases to to thousands of objects or more. It is also not an 8
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
7 9
http://culturecam.eu http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
Advanced Visual Interfaces, AVI ’14, pages 253–256,
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