Texton-based analysis of paintings

Laurens J. P. van der Maaten; Eric O. Postma

doi:10.1117/12.863082

7 September 2010 Texton-based analysis of paintings

Laurens J. P. van der Maaten, Eric O. Postma

Proceedings Volume 7798, Applications of Digital Image Processing XXXIII; 77980H (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.863082
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2010, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

The visual examination of paintings is traditionally performed by skilled art historians using their eyes. Recent advances in intelligent systems may support art historians in determining the authenticity or date of creation of paintings. In this paper, we propose a technique for the examination of brushstroke structure that views the wildly overlapping brushstrokes as texture. The analysis of the painting texture is performed with the help of a texton codebook, i.e., a codebook of small prototypical textural patches. The texton codebook can be learned from a collection of paintings. Our textural analysis technique represents paintings in terms of histograms that measure the frequency by which the textons in the codebook occur in the painting (so-called texton histograms). We present experiments that show the validity and effectiveness of our technique for textural analysis on a collection of digitized high-resolution reproductions of paintings by Van Gogh and his contemporaries. As texton histograms cannot be easily be interpreted by art experts, the paper proposes to approaches to visualize the results on the textural analysis. The first approach visualizes the similarities between the histogram representations of paintings by employing a recently proposed dimensionality reduction technique, called t-SNE. We show that t-SNE reveals a clear separation of paintings created by Van Gogh and those created by other painters. In addition, the period of creation is faithfully reflected in the t-SNE visualizations. The second approach visualizes the similarities and differences between paintings by highlighting regions in a painting in which the textural structure of the painting is unusual. We illustrate the validity of this approach by means of an experiment in which we highlight regions in a painting by Monet that are not very "Van Gogh-like". Taken together, we believe the tools developed in this study are well capable of assisting for art historians in support of their study of paintings.

Citation Download Citation

Laurens J. P. van der Maaten and Eric O. Postma "Texton-based analysis of paintings", Proc. SPIE 7798, Applications of Digital Image Processing XXXIII, 77980H (7 September 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.863082

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