The computer as connoisseur
July 2 2015
Picture: Technologyreview.com
Scientists in Serbia say they have developed a way of telling the difference between an original work of art and a copy, even if they're by the same artist, as in the case of the two identical pictures by Magritte, above. They use 'machine-vision analysis techniques', and this is how they do it:
Their fundamental hypothesis is that the action of creating original art is part of a self-organizing process orchestrated by the brain. As such, it leads to a unique level of complexity in the way paint and colors are used and distributed.
By contrast, the process of copying is much more methodical and leads to lower levels of complexity. And this difference should make it possible to distinguish originals from copies.
But how to tell the difference? Rajkovic and Milovanovic contend that this is possible using wavelet analysis that transforms a two-dimensional image into a time-frequency representation which captures information about the painting at various scales. These scales can be thought of as looking at progressively more blurred images of the paintings.
Rajkovic and Milovanovic perform this analysis using the red, green, and blue channels of a conventional RGB image of each painting. and they repeat the analysis for patches of each painting.
Sure enough, they say a difference in complexity is clearly visible between Caspers’s originals and copies. “For all patches and all the paintings, the mean global complexity of an original painting is larger than the corresponding value of a copy,” they say.
Is this now what we should call connoisseurship (for that is the process the scientists are describing): 'human-vision analysis techniques'?
More here.
