This proposal is to support a workshop on Applications of Computer Vision in Archaeology. The workshop will bring together about 100 archaeologists, cultural heritage preservationists, computer vision, visualization, graphics, and new media research and practitioners to discuss the state-of-the art in current research. The event will also provide a forum for planning and coordination of future efforts. Since the first workshop on Applications of Computer Vision in Archaeology was held in June 2003 the domain of research interest has broadened significantly to include research in graphics and visualization. At present, nearly all phases of archaeological practice, from discovery in the field, through artifact analysis and conservation, to the presentation of new findings to the public are in a period of radical change. Computer vision research combined with graphics, visualization and computational methods have made available to archaeology and other interdisciplinary research dealing visual artifacts a rich set of tools and methods to extend research capabilities. New efforts range from the creation of virtual libraries (digital publishing of field records) to computer-assisted artifact mending technologies to 3D presentations of historical site interpretations.
We organized and ran an IEEE international Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision in Archaeology (ACVA 2010) in conjunction with IEEE CVPR 2010, June 14th 2010, San Francisco, United States. The workshop provided a forum to bring together archaeologists, cultural heritage preservationists, and computer vision, visualization, graphics, and new media practitioners to discuss enabling technology for artifact vesselization as a revolutionary breakthrough for historical archaeology in the same vein that Carbon-14 dating changed prehistoric archaeology. While C14 methods transformed archaeology by establishing dating for the needs of artifact analysis, vision technology automates the artifact identifications needed prior to artifact analysis (and does so at a significant cost and labor savings). The workshop also fostered necessary synergism between the archaeological community, cultural heritage preservationists and the computational, visualization, and new media communities at large so as to nurture the novel computer vision technology applications relevant to cultural heritage, and to serve in crystallizing that need and pushing it further to the forefront. The workshop had over 60 attendees and combined computational archaeology practitioners with specialized archaeologists. Two keynote speakers were invited to the workshop. The first keynote speaker, Dr. Jed Levine, the research director at the National Park Service in Philadelphia, gave an illuminating talk on Fragmentary Evidence: An Archeologist’s View of the Promise and Problems in the Application of Computer Vision Approaches in Archeological Practice. And in the afternoon session, the second invited keynote speaker, Professor Katsushi Ikeuchi from the University of Tokyo, gave an impressive talk about some of their interesting work "e-Heritage projects in Italy, Cambodia, and Japan -- What have we learned?" Details about the conference can be found at this web site: http://acva2010.cs.drexel.edu/ and the final program at web site: http://acva2010.cs.drexel.edu/program.html. Major Findings 1. The workshop allowed for a healthy exchange between two very diverse communities and put into focus what is direly needed by the archaeologist community from the computational community. These are: (a) Facilitate the meaningful history interpretation process by reconstructing and identifying vessels automatically (or semi) and virtually (using expert opinion), freeing the experts from an enormously time consuming and costly manual labor intensive process; (b) Develop portable technology for in situ archaeology; (c) Establish the field of computational archaeology and offer introductory courses to students of archaeology co-taught with expert archaeologists. 2. A fruitful discuss on ways of accessing computational methods in archaeological applications and the formation of gold standards. It was deemed necessary to have the technology application be compared to the expert performance both in terms of accuracy of reconstruction and mending as well as time as a way for accessing the reliability of the technology. 3. Through having a session from the archaeologists point of view and perspective followed by 3 sessions on the applications of computational methods in specific archaeology based problems, there was a fruitful reorienting on the part of the computational methods community of what the true problems archaeologists face, and a better understanding of what technology tools are available to the archaeology community and how and where it can be used. 4. The one hour panel discussion at the end of the workshop was found to be extremely useful in firing up a discussion and creating synergy between the various groups working on archaeological problems. For example our group working on 3D Colonial Philadelphia has been invited to be part of the Workshop on REVEAL and Digital Archaeology held at Brown University, which brings together individuals from around the world who are working on the leading-edge integration of digital technologies into archaeological excavation, field recording, and data analysis and to have our archaeologists working in Historic Philadelphia be trained this summer to use reveal.
