mchelali/forbin_dataset

Forbin Dataset: A collection of historical photographs with archival metadata

This repository hosts a small public sample of the Forbin Dataset, a large-scale collection of historical photographs taken or collected by Victor Forbin (1868–1947).
The full dataset (images + COCO-style annotations + metadata) will be released on Hugging Face after the acceptance of the associated data paper.

This GitHub version provides:

• A small curated subset of images
• COCO-style annotations (segmentation polygons)
• Archival metadata (Box ID, description, notes, dates when available)
• A lightweight explorer interface (HTML/JS) to preview images and annotations

📜 Dataset Description

The Forbin Dataset contains digitized historical photographs from the personal archives of Victor Forbin, a French explorer, photographer, and writer.
Images are accompanied by rich metadata and manually extracted segmentation polygons suitable for:

• Computer Vision
• Document Analysis
• Cultural Heritage Studies
• Machine Learning Research

The sample included here is intended for illustration and early experimentation only.
The upcoming full release will contain tens of thousands of images with complete metadata and annotations.

🔖 License

This sample dataset is released under the following license:

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
➡️ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

This means:

• ✔ You must provide attribution
• ✔ You may share and adapt the material
• ❌ You may not use it for commercial purposes

📚 Citation

If you use this dataset or the sample in academic work, please cite the forthcoming data paper:

[Under review] 
Chelali M., Gosselet S. K., Cloppet F., Kurtz C., Bloch I. and Foliard D., The Forbin Dataset: Forbin Dataset:  A collection of historical photographs with archival metadata, 2025.

🖥️ Online Demo (GitHub Pages)

Once published, the explorer will be available at: https://mchelali.github.io/forbin_dataset/

🤝 Acknowledgment of Authors

This dataset originates from the personal archives of Victor Forbin, digitized and curated by the High Vision Project – Archives & Vision Initiative.
All annotation and data processing work was performed by the project contributors.