Title
Categorizing art: Comparing humans and computers
Abstract
The categorization of art (paintings, literature) into distinct styles such as Expressionism, or Surrealism has had a profound influence on how art is presented, marketed, analyzed, and historicized. Here, we present results from human and computational experiments with the goal of determining to which degree such categories can be explained by simple, low-level appearance information in the image. Following experimental methods from perceptual psychology on category formation, naive, non-expert participants were first asked to sort printouts of artworks from different art periods into categories. Converting these data into similarity data and running a multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) analysis, we found distinct categories which corresponded sometimes surprisingly well to canonical art periods. The result was cross-validated on two complementary sets of artworks for two different groups of participants showing the stability of art interpretation. The second focus of this paper was on determining how far computational algorithms would be able to capture human performance or would be able in general to separate different art categories. Using several state-of-the-art algorithms from computer vision, we found that whereas low-level appearance information can give some clues about category membership, human grouping strategies included also much higher-level concepts.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1016/j.cag.2009.04.003
Computers & Graphics
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Computational aesthetics,Multi-dimensional scaling,Computer vision,Human studies
Journal
33
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
0097-8493
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.41
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christian Wallraven170094.06
Roland W. Fleming21107.05
Douglas Cunningham3746.16
Jaume Rigau414314.11
Miquel Feixas563745.61
Mateu Sbert61108123.95