Figuressuch

Figuressuch is a term used in digital humanities, computer vision, and information retrieval to describe a multimodal search approach for identifying and retrieving figurative representations within large image collections. It focuses on figures in the sense of symbolic or descriptive imagery, such as artistic personifications, allegorical figures, or stylized portraits, rather than simple object recognition.

Etymology and usage: The coinage combines "figure" with the German "Such" (search) and is sometimes presented as a brandable concept in research papers. It is not a standardized taxonomy, and implementations vary widely.

Core methodology: Figuressuch systems build a cross-modal index that links visual features learned by deep convolutional networks with textual metadata, captions, tags, artist notes, and OCR-extracted text. A query can be visual, textual, or hybrid; the system returns ranked results based on multimodal similarity, contextual relevance, and provenance.

Implementation considerations: Requires image preprocessing, feature extraction, cross-modal embedding, and efficient retrieval. Evaluation uses curated datasets and user studies.

Applications: Used by museums, archives, and digital catalogs to locate figurative content, study iconography, and support curation.

Limitations: Ambiguous categories, cultural bias, copyright and licensing constraints, and potential misinterpretation of figurative content.

History: The concept drew from content-based image retrieval and multimodal search advances; early prototypes appeared in the mid-2010s, with later work integrating attention-based models and OCR.

See also: Content-based image retrieval, multimodal retrieval, visual search, image annotation.