An unique dataset for Christian sacral objects identification

Data Brief. 2023 Apr 11:48:109137. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2023.109137. eCollection 2023 Jun.

Abstract

Christian religious monuments as cathedrals, chapels, and temples, are found in many places on our planet. World-famous buildings such as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Gaudi's Cathedral in Barcelona, and St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague are commonly known. Many online photographs can be used to build machine-learning models to identify them. The number of photographs is already significantly lower for little-known buildings, such as small churches in the Czech-German border region, and similar approaches cannot be used for identification. Based on these facts, our team has compiled a unique dataset for identifying the most important elements of Christian sacral buildings as altars, frescoes, pulpits, etc., which are almost always found in them. Our data set was manually created from several thousand real photographs. This dataset seems to be very usable, e.g., for creating new machine learning models and identifying objects in sacred objects or the objects themselves.

Keywords: Christian sacral objects; Identification; Image processing; Machine learning; Middle age.