Computer analysis reveals similarities between the artistic styles of Van Gogh and Pollock

Recent advances in computer vision and image processing have enabled basic automatic analysis of visual art. Here we use computer analysis to extract thousands of numerical low-level image content descriptors from digitized paintings, and use them to objectively compare the similarities between the artistic styles of different painters. The analysis reveals that Vincent Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock share artistic styles that are far more similar to each other in terms of low-level image features compared to the similarity between the work of Pollock and other painters. The method proposed in this report can also be used to quantify similarities between painters or artistic styles based on large sets of numerical image content descriptors and detect influential links that might not be easily detected by the unaided eye.