Museum Exhibit Identification Challenge for Domain Adaptation and Beyond

Abstract: In this paper, we approach an open problem of artwork identification and propose a new dataset dubbed Open Museum Identification Challenge (Open MIC). It contains photos of exhibits captured in 10 distinct exhibition spaces of several museums which showcase paintings, timepieces, sculptures, glassware, relics, science exhibits, natural history pieces, ceramics, pottery, tools and indigenous crafts. The goal of Open MIC is to stimulate research in domain adaptation, egocentric recognition and few-shot learning by providing a testbed complementary to the famous Office dataset which reaches 90% accuracy. To form our dataset, we captured a number of images per art piece with a mobile phone and wearable cameras to form the source and target data splits, respectively. To achieve robust baselines, we build on a recent approach that aligns per-class scatter matrices of the source and target CNN streams [15]. Moreover, we exploit the positive definite nature of such representations by using end-to-end Bregman divergences and the Riemannian metric. We present baselines such as training/evaluation per exhibition and training/evaluation on the combined set covering 866 exhibit identities. As each exhibition poses distinct challenges e.g., quality of lighting, motion blur, occlusions, clutter, viewpoint and scale variations, rotations, glares, transparency, non-planarity, clipping, we break down results w.r.t. these factors.