Two recent studies suggest that natural scenes and paintings show similar statistical properties. But does the content or region of origin of an artwork affect its statistical properties? We addressed this question by having judges place paintings from a large, diverse collection of paintings into one of three subject matter categories using a forced-choice paradigm. Basic statistics for images...

Real paintings are not truly flat but change subtly with variations in viewing direction. The pigments and painting layers also interact with the lighting environment, producing changes that range from subtle to quite dramatic. These effects are lacking in digital images. This paper describes a system that allows an artist to introduce, and control, a variety of lighting and viewing effects, su...

We present a new image-based stereoscopic painterly algorithm that we use to automatically generate stereoscopic paintings. Our work is motivated by contemporary painters who have explored the aesthetic implications of painting stereo pairs of canvases. We base our method on two real images, acquired from spatially displaced cameras. We derive a depth map by utilizing computer vision depth-from...

How do we know that a kitchen is a kitchen by looking? Traditional models posit that scene categorization is achieved through recognizing necessary and sufficient features and objects, yet there is little consensus about what these may be. However, scene categories should reflect how we use visual information. Therefore, we test the hypothesis that scene categories reflect functions, or the pos...

Museumgoers often scoff that costly abstract expressionist paintings could have been made by a child and have mistaken paintings by chimpanzees for professional art. To test whether people really conflate paintings by professionals with paintings by children and animals, we showed art and nonart students paired images, one by an abstract expressionist and one by a child or animal, and asked whi...