Information Technologies in Culture and Education: Image Processing Issues

One of the most important applications of information technologies in culture and education is content creation by digitizing objects of material culture (MCO). This content is named digital heritage. Rather large databases have been created. Digital heritage processing means for the purpose of culture and education are developed and are being developed. Works regarding digitization and development of software and information systems of digital heritage of various applications is carried out under government orders and at the initiative of noncommercial associations, private persons, and companies, and sure enough it will be in progress for many decades. Creation and use of digital heritage is a vast area of human activity, which dramatically alters humanity mentality, culture, ways of education and so on. The activity has many aspects – political, legal, technical, scientific, economic and others, each of which is being actively developed. Therefore, any studies in this direction are relevant. The majority of digitized MCO are kept and used in the form of digital images. When working with digital images two problems of copy quality evaluation arise- content transfer accuracy and form transfer accuracy. Nowadays there are no legal principles and approaches to rating these non-quantitative indicators. At the same time the issue is important and relevant since different standpoint regarding the notion of “quality†and different aims pursued by creators and distributors of the content as well as users’ interests may lead to serious conflicts and become effective means in cyber wars. The paper offers classification of correspondence of MCO original and its digital copy by content, and also considers some technical aspects of digitization technology and subsequent visualization of images that allow providing high technical quality of copies and avoiding repeated digitization in the future.