AmalthAI: An Open-Source Computer Vision Platform for Cultural Heritage
Authors: Christos Chatzisavvas, Stelios Alvanos, Efstratios Politis, Panagiotis Rigas, Thomas Pappas, Ioannis Giannoukos, Nikolaos Mitianoudis, Agata Ulanowska, +8 more
Organizations: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece · Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athena Research Center, Greece · Department of Informatics & Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece · Archimedes, Athena Research Center, Greece · Faculty of Archaeology, University of Warsaw, Poland
Computer vision (CV) and machine learning (ML) offer new tools for cultural heritage (CH) artifact analysis, but the CV/ML pipeline remains largely inaccessible to CH domain experts, who lack the background to configure, train, or assess models. We present AmalthAI, an open-source CV platform that bridges this gap, enabling non-ML CH experts to independently produce and validate archaeologically meaningful findings. The interface covers dataset management, training, and inference for classification, segmentation, and object detection, with Kubeflow and Katib handling scalable training and hyperparameter search. Grad-CAM localizes the image region behind a prediction, and a vision-language model (VLM) adds a text description of it for expert review. Since archaeological data is often state-owned or rights-encumbered and cannot leave institutional custody, AmalthAI's self-hostable deployment ensures sensitive data is kept within premises. We test the platform on an archaeological use case built on a custom dataset of clay textile imprints, where CH experts trained and validated segmentation, and classification models for hypothesis testing. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/TEXTaiLES/AmalthAI.