CultureCam: Visual exploration of cultural heritage content by professional designers

This paper presents CultureCam, an online tool tailored for creative designers and artists, which offers the possibility of exploring and accessing Europeana image content in an interactive and intuitive way. By using a webcam to take a photo of any object or texture, users can invoke the CultureCam tool for accessing a set of images that are similar in color, shape or pattern. The tool stimulates the inspiration of creative designers by diving into common cultural heritage, to be used as source for new derivative designs and art. The collection of items used by CultureCam is curated by professional designers and accessible under the public domain licence. The main challenge for the CultureCam is to provide a search algorithm that satisfies the content requirements of creative designers and have the potential to inspire their work, when operating on a rather small and sparse image set.