From remote sensing and machine learning to the history of the Silk Road: large scale material identification on wall paintings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Automatic remote reflectance spectral imaging of large painted areas in high resolution, from distances of tens of meters, has made the imaging of entire architectural interior feasible. However, it has significantly increased the volume of data. Here we present a machine learning based method to automatically detect 'hidden' writings and map material variations. Clustering of reflectance spectra allowed materials at inaccessible heights to be properly identified by performing non-invasive analysis on regions in the same cluster at accessible heights using a range of complementary spectroscopic techniques. The world heritage site of the Mogao caves, along the ancient Silk Road, consists of 492 richly painted Buddhist cave temples dating from the fourth to fourteenth century. Cave 465 at the northern end of the site is unique in its Indo-Tibetan tantric Buddhist style, and like many other caves, the date of its construction is still under debate. This study demonstrates the powers of an interdisciplinary approach that combines material identification, palaeographic analysis of the revealed Sanskrit writings and archaeological evidence for the dating of the cave temple paintings, narrowing it down to the late twelfth century to thirteenth century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".