About this site
The NDL Image Bank Face Finder is a database of "faces" extracted from artworks (all Public Domain Mark) in the National Diet Library's NDL Image Bank, searchable and browsable by facets such as theme, artist, era, gender and detection confidence. The data from the original site (a build-free static site) was registered through the archivebase public API.
The collection spans modern bijin-ga by artists such as Mizuno Toshikata, Nishikawa Sukenobu and Takehisa Yumeji, alongside themes as varied as namazu-e, toy prints and yōkai imagery.
Data organization
- Records are organized hierarchically: themes (collections) ⊃ figures (items — each an NDL page image) ⊃ faces (annotations — confirmed face regions).
- Face regions are recorded as IIIF Image API region parameters (
pct:) together with native-pixel rectangles (xywh). - No images are hosted here. Every image, thumbnails included, is fetched dynamically from the NDL IIIF Image API.
Extraction methodology
- Detection: an ensemble of three detectors (a KaoKore-trained YOLO, RetinaFace, and an ukiyo-e-oriented detector)
- Verification: Vision-Language Model review with gender labels (female / male / unknown)
- Confirmation: final manual human review (ground truth)
Each face records its detector provenance in the sources metadata and its confidence in conf / conf_bucket.
License & credits
- Original images: NDL Digital Collections (NDL Image Bank), Public Domain Mark
- Face extraction data & finder: nakamura196/ndl-face-finder (MIT License)
- The original site's viewing experience uses the IIIF Curation Viewer (MIT License) by the Center for Open Data in the Humanities (CODH), and the project is inspired by CODH's "KaoKore IIIF Curation Finder".