Name that sculpture

We describe a retrieval based method for automatically determining the title and sculptor of an imaged sculpture. This is a useful problem to solve, but also quite challenging given the variety in both form and material that sculptures can take, and the similarity in both appearance and names that can occur. Our approach is to first visually match the sculpture and then to name it by harnessing the meta-data provided by Flickr users. To this end we make the following three contributions: (i) we show that using two complementary visual retrieval methods (one based on visual words, the other on boundaries) improves both retrieval and precision performance; (ii) we show that a simple voting scheme on the tf-idf weighted meta-data can correctly hypothesize a subset of the sculpture name (provided that the meta-data has first been suitably cleaned up and normalized); and (iii) we show that Google image search can be used to query expand the name sub-set, and thereby correctly determine the full name of the sculpture. The method is demonstrated on over 500 sculptors covering more than 2000 sculptures. We also quantitatively evaluate the system and demonstrate correct identification of the sculpture on over 60% of the queries.