Animated Territorial Data Extractor (ATDE): A Computer-Vision Method for Extracting Territorial Data from Animated Historical Maps
This tool addresses the need for automated territorial data extraction from animated maps for educational and preliminary analysis purposes, though it is incremental as it builds on existing computer vision techniques.
The researchers tackled the problem of extracting quantitative territorial data from animated historical map videos by developing ATDE, a computer vision tool that uses color segmentation and filtering to convert videos into structured time-series data, demonstrated on ten Chinese dynasties with results aligning to historical patterns.
We present Animated Territorial Data Extractor (ATDE), a computer vision tool that extracts quantitative territorial data from animated historical map videos. ATDE employs HSV-based color segmentation, RGB channel filtering, and Direct-Neighbor Filtering to identify and count pixels representing territorial control. Combined with preprocessing for temporal alignment and cross-video scaling, the pipeline converts animated videos into structured time-series data. We demonstrate the tool on ten Chinese dynasties (200 BCE - 1912 CE), producing year-by-year pixel counts that align with expected historical patterns. While not a substitute for authoritative historical datasets, ATDE is well-suited for educational demonstrations, preliminary data exploration, and comparative analysis of territorial dynamics. The tool requires no pre-existing shapefiles and can be applied to any animated map video given seed colors and basic configuration. Code and examples are available on GitHub.