Ceramics - the humble mix of earth, fire and artistry - have been part of a global conversation for millennia.
From Tang Dynasty trade routes to Renaissance palaces, from museum vitrines to high-stakes auction floors, they've carried culture across borders, evolving into status symbols, commodities and pieces of contested history. Their value has been shaped by aesthetics and economics, empire and, now, technology.
This figure visualizes 20 representative Chinese ceramic craftsmanship styles across seven historical periods, ranging from the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) to the Modern era (1913-2025). These styles, including kiln-specific categories and decorative techniques, were selected for their historical significance and visual distinctiveness for the AI's training dataset. Courtesy of Yanfeng Hu, Siqi Wu, Zhuoran Ma and Si Cheng. In a lab at University Putra Malaysia, that legacy meets silicon. Researchers there, alongside colleagues at UNSW Sydney, have built an AI system that can classify Chinese ceramics and predict their value with uncanny precision. The tool uses deep learning to analyze decorative motifs, shapes and kiln-specific craftsmanship. It predicts price categories based on real auction data from institutions like Sotheby's and Christie's, achieving test accuracy as high as 99%.
Beyond form, the AI also analyzes the intricate decorative patterns found on Chinese ceramics, which are organized into six major categories: plant patterns, animal motifs, landscapes, human figures, crackled glaze patterns and geometric designs. The system annotates images at the category level based on the most visually dominant pattern types. Courtesy of Yanfeng Hu, Siqi Wu, Zhuoran Ma, and Si Cheng. It's all powered by an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090, a consumer-grade GPU beloved by gamers, explains Siqi Wu, one of the researchers behind the project. Not a data center, not specialized industrial hardware, just the same chip pushing frame rates for gamers enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2 across the world.
The motivation is as old as the trade routes those ceramics once traveled: access, but in this case, access to expertise rather than material goods.
The AI system employs a typological classification system for ceramic vessel shapes, based on modular morphological parts like the bottle neck, handle, shoulder, spout, body and base. This approach allows for detailed analysis and classification of shapes such as bottles, jars, plates, bowls, cups, pots and washbasins. Courtesy of Yanfeng Hu, Siqi Wu, Zhuoran Ma and Si Cheng. Artifact pricing and dating still heavily rely on expert judgment, Wu said. That expertise remains elusive for younger collectors, smaller institutions and digital archive projects. Wu's team aims to change that by making cultural appraisal more objective, scalable and accessible to a wider audience.
It doesn't stop at classification. The system pairs its YOLOv11-based detection model with an algorithm that learned market value directly from years of real-world auction results. In one test, the AI assessed a Ming Dynasty artifact at roughly 30% below its final hammer price. It's a reminder that even in an industry steeped in tradition, algorithms can offer new perspectives.
Those perspectives don't just quantify heritage, they extend the conversation. The team is already exploring AI for other forms of cultural visual heritage, from Cantonese opera costumes to historical murals.
For now, a graphics card built for gaming is parsing centuries of craftsmanship and entering one of the world's oldest and most global debates: what makes something valuable?
More from Nvidia
28/08/2025
Brace yourself, COGs - the Locusts aren't the only thing rising up. The Coal...
28/08/2025
Last week at Gamescom, NVIDIA announced the winners of the NVIDIA and ModDB RTX ...
27/08/2025
AI models are advancing at a rapid rate and scale.
But what might they lack that (most) humans don't? Common sense: an understanding, developed through rea...
25/08/2025
Robots around the world are about to get a lot smarter as physical AI developers...
25/08/2025
As autonomous vehicle systems rapidly grow in complexity, equipped with reasonin...
22/08/2025
As the latest member of the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture family, the NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPU builds on core innovations to accelerate training and AI reason...
22/08/2025
AI reasoning, inference and networking will be top of mind for attendees of next...
21/08/2025
Japan is once again building a landmark high-performance computing system - not ...
21/08/2025
From AI assistants doing deep research to autonomous vehicles making split-second navigation decisions, AI adoption is exploding across industries.
Behind ever...
21/08/2025
Across the globe, AI factories are rising - massive new data centers built not to serve up web pages or email, but to train and deploy intelligence itself. Inte...
21/08/2025
Get a glimpse into the future of gaming.
The NVIDIA Blackwell RTX architecture is coming to GeForce NOW in September, marking the service's biggest upgrade...
20/08/2025
Editor's note: This blog is a part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused o...
18/08/2025
With over 175 games now supporting NVIDIA DLSS 4 - a suite of advanced, AI-power...
18/08/2025
At Gamescom, NVIDIA is releasing its first major update to Project G Assist - an...
15/08/2025
Of around 7,000 languages in the world, a tiny fraction are supported by AI lang...
14/08/2025
NVIDIA is partnering with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a...
14/08/2025
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Definitive Edition is marching onto GeForce NOW,...
13/08/2025
Black Forest Labs' FLUX.1 Kontext [dev] image editing model is now available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice.
FLUX.1 models allow users to edit existing imag...
11/08/2025
Using NVIDIA digital twin technologies, Amazon Devices & Services is powering bi...
11/08/2025
Packing the power of the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture in compact, energy-effici...
11/08/2025
Physical AI is becoming the foundation of smart cities, facilities and industria...
07/08/2025
This GFN Thursday brings an offer members can't refuse - 2K's highly ant...
05/08/2025
Two new open-weight AI reasoning models from OpenAI released today bring cutting...
05/08/2025
In collaboration with OpenAI, NVIDIA has optimized the company's new open-so...
05/08/2025
NVIDIA and OpenAI began pushing the boundaries of AI with the launch of NVIDIA D...
05/08/2025
NVIDIA GPUs are at the heart of modern computing. They're used across industries - from healthcare and finance to scientific research, autonomous systems an...
31/07/2025
August brings new levels of gaming excitement on GeForce NOW, with 2,300 titles now available to stream in the cloud.
Grab a controller and get ready for epic ...
31/07/2025
Interest in generative AI is continuing to grow, as new models include more capabilities. With the latest advancements, even enthusiasts without a developer bac...
29/07/2025
FourCastNet3 (FCN3) is the latest AI global weather forecasting system from NVID...
28/07/2025
The electrical grid is designed to support loads that are relatively steady, such as lighting, household appliances, and industrial machines that operate at con...
24/07/2025
For media company Black Mixture, AI isn't just a tool - it's an entire p...
24/07/2025
Sharpen the blade and brace for a journey steeped in myth and mystery. WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers has launched in the cloud.
Ride in style with skateboarding leg...
23/07/2025
In today's fast-evolving digital landscape, marketing teams face increasing ...
22/07/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI On blog series, which explores th...
17/07/2025
Listen up citizens, the law is back and patrolling the cloud. Nacon's RoboCop Rogue City - Unfinished Business launches today in the cloud, bringing justice...
15/07/2025
Submissions for NVIDIA's Plug and Play: Project G-Assist Plug-In Hackathon a...
14/07/2025
This month, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang promoted AI in both Washington, D.C. and Beijing - emphasizing the benefits that AI will bring to business and s...
11/07/2025
Ceramics - the humble mix of earth, fire and artistry - have been part of a global conversation for millennia.
From Tang Dynasty trade routes to Renaissance pa...
10/07/2025
In the race to understand our planet's changing climate, speed and accuracy are everything. But today's most widely used climate simulators often strugg...
10/07/2025
As one of the world's largest emerging markets, Indonesia is making strides toward its Golden 2045 Vision - an initiative tapping digital technologies and...
10/07/2025
Grab a friend and climb toward the clouds - PEAK is now available on GeForce NOW, enabling members to try the hugely popular indie hit on virtually any device.
...
10/07/2025
Coding assistants or copilots - AI-powered assistants that can suggest, explain and debug code - are fundamentally changing how software is developed for both e...
08/07/2025
Modern AI applications increasingly rely on models that combine huge parameter c...
03/07/2025
The forecast this month is showing a 100% chance of epic gaming. Catch the scorching lineup of 20 titles coming to the cloud, which gamers can play whether indo...
02/07/2025
Black Forest Labs, one of the world's leading AI research labs, just changed the game for image generation.
The lab's FLUX.1 image models have earned g...
01/07/2025
In many parts of the world, including major technology hubs in the U.S., there's a yearslong wait for AI factories to come online, pending the buildout of n...
26/06/2025
As of today, NVIDIA now supports the general availability of Gemma 3n on NVIDIA RTX and Jetson. Gemma, previewed by Google DeepMind at Google I/O last month, in...
26/06/2025
Editor's note: This blog is a part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused o...
26/06/2025
Mark Theriault founded the startup FITY envisioning a line of clever cooling products: cold drink holders that come with freezable pucks to keep beverages cold ...
Ceramics - the humble mix of earth, fire and artistry - have been part of a global conversation for millennia.
