When Was That Made?

Abstract

In this paper, we explore deep learning methods for estimating when the objects were made. Temporal estimation of objects is a challenging task which requires expertise in the object domain. With temporal information of objects, historian, genealogists, sociologist, archaeologist or conservationists can study the past through the objects. Toward this goal, we utilize features from existing deep networks and fine-tune new networks for temporal estimation task. The results demonstrate that the deep learning approach outperforms both a color-based baseline and visual data mining approach which is the previous state of the art method for the temporal estimation. To gain the insights into the deep network performance, we provide the analyses of neuron activations and their entropy including neuron temporal sensitivity, neuron activity and the correlation between discriminative parts from the deep network and the data mining approach. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of the temporal estimation pipeline for an interesting application such as fashion trend analysis.