Abstract: Image resources play an important part in the protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). Aiming at the problems existing in the presentation and organization of ICH image resources, this paper proposes a method for describing semantic information of ICH images based on the existing mature theories and techniques. This paper constructs a semantic description framework for ICH images based on Panofsky and Shatford’s image theories. A complete image context keyword extraction process is designed for the framework, and corresponding experimental operations and empirical research of effectiveness are carried out.The experiment successfully extracts semantic keyword information from the sample data, and demonstrates that the method in this paper is better than the existing bibliographic system in general, with higher precision and recall rate.

Key words: Intangible Cultural Heritage, Image semantic description, Keyword extraction, Image annotation, Image metadata, Image content description