Automated Monitoring of Stolen Cultural Artifacts on Online Marketplaces

Tracking and identifying stolen cultural artifacts on online marketplaces is a daunting task that has to be accomplished through manual search. In this paper, an automated monitoring tool is developed to track and identify stolen cultural goods on targeted online sales platforms. In case of theft, the original owner can upload descriptive keywords and photos of the stolen objects to start monitoring tasks to track and identify the stolen objects on targeted online marketplaces and get alerted when identical or highly similar objects appear on the monitored sales platforms. The technical challenges posed by automated monitoring are addressed by proposed advanced crawling and image feature extraction and matching solutions. With the support of proposed novel techniques, the developed monitoring tool can efficiently and effectively monitor stolen artifacts on online marketplaces, significantly reducing the manual inspection effort.