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Tuesday, 02 August 2011 15:20

Digital analysis is invading the world of the connoisseur

JUDGING artistic styles, and the similarities between them, might be thought one bastion of human skill that machines could never storm. Not so, if Lior Shamir at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan is correct. A paper he has just published in Leonardo suggests that computers may have just as good an eye for style as humans do—and, in some cases, may see connections between artists that human critics have missed.

Dr Shamir, a computer scientist, presented 57 images by each of nine painters—Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Vasily Kandinsky, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mark Rothko and Vincent van Gogh—to a computer, to see what it made of them. The computer broke the images into a number of so-called numerical descriptors. These descriptors quantified textures and colours, the statistical distribution of edges across a canvas, the distributions of particular types of shape, the intensity of the colour of individual points on a painting, and also the nature of any fractal-like patterns within it (fractals are features that reproduce similar shapes at different scales; the edges of snowflakes, for example).

All told, the computer identified 4,027 different numerical descriptors. Once their values had been established for each of the 513 artworks that had been fed into it, it was ready to do the analysis.

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