Pictures at an Eigen - Exhibition

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” but finding the right thousand words to describe a picture has no simple adage. Camera phones and other mobile devices can easily capture a scene, but processing the image to inform its contents and describe the scene requires efficient object recognition and identification. In an effort to augment reality in a potential virtual museum guide, this document presents an efficient method to identify a painting centered in a camera phone digital image. This expedient and accurate algorithm taps the principal component transform to map the thirty-three paintings of interest into an alternative subspace spanned by an orthogonal basis of eigenimages. Within the eigenspace, Euclidean distance computation and subsequent feature recognition simplify into juxtaposition of the transformed image coordinates and the known eigencoefficients of our thirty-three known paintings.