Texture based Drawing Tool Classification in Infrared Reflectograms

The recognition of painted strokes is an important step in analyzing painted works of art like paintings, drawings and underdrawings. But even for art experts, it is difficult to recognize all drawing tools and materials used for the creation of the strokes. Thus the use of computer aided imaging technologies brings a new and objective analysis and assists the art expert in analyzing painted works of art. This work proposes a method to recognize strokes drawn by different drawing tools and materials. The method uses texture analysis algorithms performing along the drawing trace to distinguish between different types of strokes. The benefit of this method is the increased content of textural information within the stroke and simultaneously in the border region. We tested our algorithms on a set of six different types of strokes: 3 classes of fluid and 3 classes of dry drawing materials.