Historian: A Large-Scale Historical Film Dataset with Cinematographic Annotation

Abstract

Developing automated tools for sustainable film preservation of extensive historical film collections assumes an understanding of fundamental cinematographic settings. In order to be able to investigate new approaches to detect and classify cinematographic settings, this paper proposes a novel large-scale historical film dataset with cinematographic annotations (HISTORIAN), i.e., shot boundaries, shot types, camera movements. The dataset consists of 98 digitized original analog film reels related to the Second World War and 10593 film shots manually annotated with human film experts. Moreover, annotations for overscan areas such as sprocket holes are included. A baseline film analysis pipeline is introduced and evaluated. To the best of our knowledge, HISTORIAN is the first dataset that covers the challenges and characteristics of historical film documentaries and provides novel possibilities for exploring automatic film analysis tools.