Illumination Detection in IIIF Medieval Manuscripts Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Illuminated manuscripts are essential iconographic sources for medieval studies. With the massive adoption of IIIF, old and new digital collections of manuscripts are accessible online and provide interoperable image data. However, finding illuminations within the manuscripts’ pages is increasingly time consuming. This article proposes an approach based on machine learning and transfer learning that browses IIIF manuscript pages and detects the illuminated ones. To evaluate our approach, a group of domain experts created a new dataset of manually annotated IIIF manuscripts. The preliminary results show that our algorithm detects the main illuminated pages in a manuscript, thus reducing experts’ search time.