Clustering Face Carvings: Exploring the Devatas of Angkor Wat
We propose a framework for clustering and visualization of images of face carvings at archaeological sites. The pairwise similarities among face carvings are computed by performing Procrustes analysis on local facial features (eyes, nose, mouth, etc.). The distance between corresponding face features is computed using point distribution models; the final pairwise similarity is the weighted sum of feature similarities. A web-based interface is provided to allow domain experts to interactively assign different weights to each face feature, and display hierarchical clustering results in 2D or 3D projections obtained by multidimensional scaling. The proposed framework has been successfully applied to the devata goddesses depicted in the ancient Angkor Wat temple. The resulting clusterings and visualization will enable a systematic anthropological, ethnological and artistic analysis of nearly 1,800 stone portraits of devatas of Angkor Wat.