Multimedia Meets Archaeology: A Novel Interdisciplinary Teaching Approach

Multimedia information processing course includes image processing, text processing, video processing, audio processing, graphics, and animation. Classical multimedia information processing course is to lecture these contents as independent course units, making the course teaching inconsistently and student's learning interest and attention lost easily. Archaeology is a cross-disciplinary field, where an archaeological research project needs to use a variety of multimedia information processing technologies. This paper introduces a novel cross-disciplinary course teaching approach to combine traditional multimedia information processing techniques with archaeological research content in the new engineering era, which increases students' attention and interest in the multimedia information processing course. Teaming up with the archaeology professor, we present two multimedia-archaeology projects: intelligent pottery fragments splicing and intelligent Oracle inscription recognition. We have addressed a few challenges in our courses: 1) how to guide students efficiently to implement different project contents, e.g., using the scanner to acquire three-dimensional porcelain fragment data skillfully. 2) How to inspire students to learn and use various multimedia processing technologies and archaeology knowledge. 3) How the teacher adapts the teaching content according to the dynamic interests of the students. To address these challenges, students are grouped into two project teams based on their strengths and interests. We introduce collaborative learning and active learning strategies to help students learn and use different knowledge and address project problems and learning problems. We also invite the archaeological professor to teach basic archaeology knowledge in the class. Furthermore, to better understand the students' learning situation, we present a weekly project progress report approach, which can also help the teacher adjust the teaching content. This teaching approach can enhance the continuity of multimedia information processing teaching and stimulate students' enthusiasm and creativity in learning. Moreover, it can deepen the cultural atmosphere of the teaching in an engineering course.