ImageOP: The Image Dataset with Religious Buildings in the World Heritage Town of Ouro Preto for Deep Learning Classification

Artificial intelligence has significant applications in computer vision studies for cultural heritage. In this research field, visual inspection of historical buildings and the digitization of heritage using machine learning models stand out. However, the literature still lacks datasets for the classification and identification of Brazilian religious buildings using deep learning, particularly with images from the historic town of Ouro Preto. It is noteworthy that Ouro Preto was the first Brazilian World Heritage Site recognized by UNESCO in 1980. In this context, this paper aims to address this gap by proposing a new image dataset, termed ImageOP: The Image Dataset with Religious Buildings in the World Heritage Town of Ouro Preto for Deep Learning Classification. This new dataset comprises 1613 images of facades from 32 religious monuments in the historic town of Ouro Preto, categorized into five classes: fronton (pediment), door, window, tower, and church. The experiments to validate the ImageOP dataset were conducted in two stages: simulations and computer vision using smartphones. Furthermore, two deep learning structures (MobileNet V2 and EfficientNet B0) were evaluated using Edge Impulse software. MobileNet V2 and EfficientNet B0 are architectures of convolutional neural networks designed for computer vision applications aiming at low computational cost, real-time classification on mobile devices. The results indicated that the models utilizing EfficientNet achieved the best outcomes in the simulations, with accuracy = 94.5%, precision = 96.0%, recall = 96.0%, and F-score = 96.0%. Additionally, superior accuracy values were obtained in detecting the five classes: fronton (96.4%), church (97.1%), window (89.2%), door (94.7%), and tower (95.4%). The results from the experiments with computer vision and smartphones reinforced the effectiveness of the proposed dataset, showing an average accuracy of 88.0% in detecting building elements across nine religious monuments tested for real-time mobile device application. The dataset is available in the Mendeley Data repository.