Untrained observers readily cluster paintings from different art periods into distinct groups according to their overall visual appearance or “look” [WCF08]. These clusters are typically influenced by both the content of the paintings (e.g. portrait, landscape, still-life, etc.), and stylistic considerations (e.g. the “flat” appearance of Gothic paintings, or the distinctive use of colour in Fa...

Based on findings that fluency of mental operations is hedonically marked and associated with more favorable evaluations of the processed target (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004a; Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003) we investigated the contribution of such fluency effects for aesthetic appreciation. Using bogus titles that either facilitated or hindered semantic processing of pai...

This paper is about authenticating genuine van Gogh paintings from forgeries. The authentication process depends on two key steps: feature extraction and outlier detection. In this paper, a geometric tight frame and some simple statistics of the tight frame coefficients are used to extract features from the paintings. Then a forward stage-wise rank boosting is used to select a small set of feat...

Paintings are made up of materials that can suffer damage with the passage of time. To protect them over a long period, they are coated with a protecting covering of varnish layer. The varnish layer over paintings is affected by atmospheric conditions, fluctuations in temperatures, humidity and sunlight. Over a period of time, the transparency of the varnish becomes clouded and discolored, ofte...

A case study to evaluate the use of microfading spectrometry (MFS) for the study of colored systems found in prehistoric rock art paintings was conducted in the Cova Remígia rock-shelter, Castellón (Spain). This rock shelter is part of the rock art sites of the Mediterranean basin on the Iberian Peninsula included in UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Some of the paintings belonging to this group ar...

Domain-specific knowledge of paintings defines a wide range of concepts for annotation and flexible retrieval of paintings. In this work, we employ the ontology of artistic concepts that includes visual (or atomic) concepts at the intermediate level and high-level concepts at the application level. Visual-level concepts include artistic color and brushwork concepts that serve as cues for annota...

While artists demonstrate their individual styles through paintings and drawings, how to describe such artistic styles well selected visual features towards computerized analysis of the arts remains to be a challenging research problem. In this paper, we propose an integrated feature-based artistic descriptor with Monte Carlo Convex Hull (MCCH) feature selection model and support vector machine...

The hands and mind of an artist are intimately involved in the creative process of image formation, intrinsically making paintings significantly more complex than photographs to analyze. In spite of this difficulty, several years ago the artist David Hockney and I identified optical evidence within a number of paintings that demonstrated artists began using optical projections as early as c1425...

For centuries, oil paintings have been a major segment of the visual arts. The JenAesthetics data set consists of a large number of high-quality images of oil paintings of Western provenance from different art periods. With this database, we studied the relationship between objective image measures and subjective evaluations of the images, especially evaluations on aesthetics (defined as artist...

The effect of the orientation of Mondrian's paintings on their aesthetic appeal was examined. Eight paintings, four with horizontal/vertical frames in the original and four with oblique frames, were presented in eight different orientations and rated for aesthetic appeal on a 7-point scale. There was a stronger preference for pictures presented so that their component lines were horizontal and ...