Bishnupur heritage image dataset (BHID): a resource for various computer vision applications

Abstract

Bishnupur is an attractive tourist place in West Bengal, India and is known for its terracotta temples. The place is one of the prospective candidates to be included in the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites. We intend to preserve this heritage site digitally and also to present some virtual interaction for the tourist and researchers. In this paper, we present an image dataset of different temples (namely, Jor Bangla, Kalachand, Madan Mohan, Radha Madhav, Rasmancha, Shyamrai and Nandalal) in Bishnupur for evaluating different types of computer vision and image processing algorithms (like 3D reconstruction, image inpainting, texture classification and content specific image retrieval). The dataset is captured using four different cameras with different parameter settings. Some datasets are extracted and earmarked for certain applications such as texture classification, image inpainting and content specific image retrieval. Example results of baseline methods are also shown for these applications. Thus we evaluate the usefulness of this dataset. To the best of our knowledge, probably this is the first attempt of combined dataset for evaluating various types of problems for a heritage site in India. The dataset is publicly available at http://www.isical.ac.in/~bsnpr/ for research purpose only.