Fine Art Pattern Extraction and Recognition

Cultural heritage, especially the fine arts, plays an invaluable role in the cultural, historical, and economic growth of our societies. Works of fine art are primarily developed for aesthetic purposes and mainly expressed through painting, sculpture, and architecture. In recent years, owing to technological improvements and drastic cost reductions, a large-scale digitization effort has been made, which has led to the increasing availability of large, digitized fine art collections. Coupled with recent advances in pattern recognition and computer vision, this availability has provided, especially for researchers in these fields, new opportunities to assist the art community by using automatic tools to further analyze and understand works of fine arts. Among other benefits, a deeper understanding of the fine arts has the potential to make these works more accessible to a wider population, in terms of both fruition and creation, thus supporting the spread of culture.