{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/large-scale-historical-watermark-recognition","title":"Large-Scale Historical Watermark Recognition: dataset and a new consistency-based approach","arxiv_id":"1908.10254","date":"2019-08-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Xi Shen","Ilaria Pastrolin","Oumayma Bounou","Spyros Gidaris","Marc Smith","Olivier Poncet","Mathieu Aubry"],"abstract":"Historical watermark recognition is a highly practical, yet unsolved challenge for archivists and historians. With a large number of well-defined classes, cluttered and noisy samples, different types of representations, both subtle differences between classes and high intra-class variation, historical watermarks are also challenging for pattern recognition. In this paper, overcoming the difficulty of data collection, we present a large public dataset with more than 6k new photographs, allowing for the first time to tackle at scale the scenarios of practical interest for scholars: one-shot instance recognition and cross-domain one-shot instance recognition amongst more than 16k fine-grained classes. We demonstrate that this new dataset is large enough to train modern deep learning approaches, and show that standard methods can be improved considerably by using mid-level deep features. More precisely, we design both a matching score and a feature fine-tuning strategy based on filtering local matches using spatial consistency. This consistency-based approach provides important performance boost compared to strong baselines. Our model achieves 55% top-1 accuracy on our very challenging 16,753-class one-shot cross-domain recognition task, each class described by a single drawing from the classic Briquet catalog. In addition to watermark classification, we show our approach provides promising results on fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10254v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.10254v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"large-scale-historical-watermark-recognition","repo_url":"https://github.com/XiSHEN0220/WatermarkReco","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"16k","task_name":"16k"},{"task_slug":"image-retrieval","task_name":"Image Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"sketch-based-image-retrieval","task_name":"Sketch-Based Image Retrieval"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}