An effective method to detect and categorize digitized traditional Chinese paintings

Traditional Chinese painting (TCP) is the gem of Chinese traditional arts. More and more TCP images are digitized and exhibited on the Internet. Effectively browsing and retrieving them is an important problem that needs to be addressed. Gongbi (traditional Chinese realistic painting) and Xieyi (freehand style) are two basic types of traditional Chinese paintings. This paper proposes a scheme to detect TCPs from general images and categorize them into Gongbi and Xieyi schools. Low-level features such as color histogram, color coherence vectors, autocorrelation texture features and the newly proposed edge-size histogram are used to achieve the high-level classification. Support vector machine (SVM) is applied as the main classifier to obtain satisfactory classification results. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the method. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.