Humans of Paris 1900

Motivation

We take inspiration from the famous Instagram page, Humans of New York, which features pictures and stories of people living in current day New York. In similar fashion, our project, Humans of Paris, has the aim to be a platform to connect us to the people of 19th century Paris. Photography was still in its early stages when Nadar took up the craft in his atelier in Paris. Through the thousands of pictures taken by him and his son we can get a glimpse of who lived at the time. We explore the use of deep learning models to cluster similar faces to get an alternative, innovative view of the collection and allowing for serendipitous discovery of patterns and people. There is a story behind every person, and our interface highlights this by association people’s story with their picture.

Implementation

Website Description

In more concrete terms, our project involves four core interfaces motivated by the above.

• A home page highlighting the most known individuals
• A page (FaceMap) that highlight similarities in differences in the faces of the people in the dataset.
• A page to find your 19th century doppelganger, for fun and to gather interest in people the user my otherwise would never have known existed.
• A way to search using tags, to allow users to find individuals of interest.

To each person in the pictures we associate background information crawled from wikipedia.

Methods & Evaluation

Getting & Processing Metadata

As a first approach, we use the library provided by Raphael to get a list of all the photos in the collection of the foundation Nadar on Gallica. Nadar's collection contains a variety of genres: portraits, comics, caricatures, paysage, sculptures, etc. In order to stick to our emphasis on ‘people of 19th century Paris’, we filtered out photographs that are not directly relevant to people of that time.

• Getting individual portraits

We used metadata of Gallica collection to filter irrelevant photographs. Among a number of attribute objects in the metadata, we concentrated on ‘dc:subject’ attribute. This field contains a list that has detailed information about the photograph and the entity in that photo: [Names of individuals],(year of birth - year of death) -- [genre of the photograph]. For each row, We ignored subjects that do not have the substring “-- Portraits” and returned the new list of subjects. This way, we can discard the landscape, comics, caricatures, and sculptures. After filtering only ‘Portraits’, we had column of list that varied in length: that is, the number of people featured in photographs differed. Since our intention is to connect ourselves to people of 19th century Paris by presenting story of each Parisien-ne in the photograph, we filtered out the photographs that features more than one person. In order to filter and get insights of people who work in the same field or had the same role we created the concept of tags that helps us to access and query groups of people.

• First attempt

Gallica ‘dc:subject’ metadata had very brief information on each person - only name, year of birth, and year of death, which are not enough information to sort categorize each person. On the other hand, there is ‘dc:title’ metadata that gives title of each photograph, but they were variance in texts. Moreover, for some photographs, especially ‘Portrait du theatre’, the descriptions were on fictional characters which some performers had represented, not on the performers. As a result, we had to find another dataset to finish this task.

• Second attempt

Data.bnf.fr is the project driven by BnF in order to make the data produced by the BnF more visible on the Web, and federate them within and outside the catalogues. Since Gallica is one of the BnF projects, it is reasonable to assume that a person who has their name in Gallica metadata will have some document or page in data.bnf.fr semantic web. In order to get corresponding pages, we queried metadata though python SPARQL API Data.bnf XML schema has three name attributes: foaf:name, foaf:givenName, foaf:famliyName. We checked how names in <dc:subject> is arranged, compare the arrangement with some names in Data.bnf, rearranged names accordingly, then queried them.

Sometimes query result contained different entities that have the same name. For this case, we exploited the fact that we are handling 19th century data, taken by one author, Nadar. Among the namesakes, we chose the one whose living period overlaps the most with that of Nadar.

Creating Tags out of metadata

Table from data.bnf html page contains a variety of useful information: name, nationality, language, gender, short description, etc. We used description and nationality to create tags. Our idea of extracting tag from descriptions is using most frequent nouns that appears across different people, except stopwords The problem here is that, some important keywords and entities are broken down under wordcount. For example, “Legion d’honneur”, is split into “legion” and “d’honneur” and the original meaning is lost. This is handled by manual jobs. First, we checked the wordcount without stopwords, and got the frequent words that are not profession-related nouns. We checked the notes that contain those words and examined if they are part of important (and frequent) phrases. For the phrases that are found, we concatenated them into one word, so that they can be used as tag. After this step, we fetched 300 major keywords, some being feminin or plural conjugation of another. Cleaning those semantic duplicates were done manually. For future improvement, this job can be done by using proper french NLP library. Once creating list of all possible tags is done, we can assign tags for each picture by having intersection between list of all tags and list of words in each description. Finally, nationality is added in the list of tags.

Using Wikipedia as criteria of importance

Data.bnf contains useful information on each person, but it is hard to infer their historic influence only by looking at the table. So we used wikipedia as a criteria that define people’s ‘importance’ - more images they have in their page, more important. We used Wikipedia API library that is available in pypy (https://pypi.org/project/wikipedia/) The library instance contains Wikipedia page, number of images and reference links they have. Moreover, it has auto-suggestion, so the query string does not have to be an exact match with the article we are looking for. Sometimes auto-suggestion fails. To handle these cases, we verified if the content of Wikipedia page contains the name and the birth/death year of the person.The wiki content that does not have enough match were considered false positives and neglected. The number of images in each Wikipedia page defines ‘weight’ of the person. We got this for English and French Wikipedia in order to represent the importance outside francophone culture as well. The final weight (or importance) is the average between two, so the ones that have Wikipedia pages for both languages are boosted in importance.

This code produces the following table:

Metadata	Accuracy (%)
Data.bnf.fr page	94
English Wikipedia	100
French Wikipedia	98

Image processing and cropping

To get nicer visuals we decided to crop the background on which the photograph is placed. Cropping the background is done based on edge detection. We base our code off of (https://github.com/polm/ndl-crop) but make modifications to adapt it to use on sepia photography on blue backgrounds. This involves adding an additional preprocessing step that sets the blue background to white. We determine the background using the RGB values. It uses image processing techniques provided by OpenCV to find the contours in the images, from which we infer boundaries. Setting the blue background to white gives us better contour detection. Using heuristics about the size of the photo against the background we then choose the most appropriate boundary. See figure x to see an example of the process.

Cropping the face is done using the facial rectangle returned by the py-agender api (see below) and MTCNN. MTCNN (https://github.com/ipazc/mtcnn) is an other python library implementing a Deep Neural Network as proposed by FaceNet (also used to find the facial vectors, see openface). Py-agender is much quicker, so we use it for the initial cropping.

Evaluation To check how well the background is cropped, we randomly sampled 100 images and check for the cropping. 91% of images are correctly cropped. The incorrectly cropped images contain some border. None of them are overcropped. We might be able to do better by tuning the assumptions we make to choose the most appropriate boundary, as we are currently missing very large pictures and very small ones. But for the current stage of the project we find the accuracy to be sufficient.

Looking at the face cropping done with py-agender, we find a total of 52 incorrectly cropped images. We also find 71 images where no face could be found, despite there being one in the image. We find this number by looking through all 1874 cropped images. We rectify that badly cropped images using the MTCNN library, which correctly identifies that cropped images that do not contain a face and correctly crops those images given the original image. In the end we get 5 incorrectly cropped portraits. They are all from very washed out and damaged photos. We replace those images with manually cropped faces.

Project execution plan

Milestones

Weekly working plan

Timeframe	Task	Completion
Week 4
07.11	Understanding Gallica Query Gallica API	✓
	Query Gallica API
Week 5
14.10	Start preprocessing images	✓
	Choose suitable Wikipedia API
Week 6
21.10	Choose face recognition library	✓
	Get facial vectors
	Try database design with Docker & Flask
Week 7
28.10	Remove irrelevant backgrounds of images	✓
	Extract age and gender from images
	Design data model
	Extract tags, names, birth and death years out of metadata
Week 8
04.11	Set up database environment	✓
	Set up mockup user-interface
	Prepare midterm presentation
Week 9
11.11	Get tags, names, birth and death years in ready-to-use format	✓
	Handle Wikipedia false positives
	Integrate face recognition functionalities into database
Week 10
18.11	Create draft of the website (frontend)
	Create FaceMap using D3
	Week 11
25.11	Integrate all functionalities
	Finalize project website
	Week 12
02.12	Write Project report