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IST Researcher Seeks Out Authentic Artwork
07/03/2008
by Jenna Spinelle
As museums continue to digitize their art collections, it becomes increasingly easier for paintings to be forged. Two Penn State researchers are part of an international team working on a digital system to help tell original works from counterfeit works. by Jenna Spinelle
James Z. Wang , associate professor of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), and Jia Li, associate professor of statistics, were part of a group of researchers that published the paper, “Image Processing for Artist Identification: Computerized Analysis for Vincent van Gogh’s Painting Brushstrokes” in the July 2008 issue of IEEE Signal Processing.
The team’s findings are based on 101 high-resolution grayscale scans of van Gogh paintings provided by the Van Gogh and Kröller-Müller Museums in the Netherlands. Wang and Li broke each scan down into sections measuring 512 pixels by 512 pixels, or about 2.5 inches by 2.5 inches in canvas size, and analyzed them based on patterns and geometric characteristics of the brush strokes.
From the 101 scans they received from the museums, art historians identified 23 as unquestionably authentic van Gogh works. These were used by their computer system as a training database for van Gogh’s brushstroke styles.
Statistical models were created to capture the unique style, or “handwriting,” that became the artist’s signature in 23 of the scans. The other 78 — either works of van Gogh, works of van Gogh’s peers or paintings that had at one time been attributed to him but later found to be unauthentic — were compared against the generated models to test the algorithms.
Wang and Li, along with Computer Science and Engineering Ph.D student Weina Ge, compiled those findings into an online system that allows any painting to be compared against existing data to help determine its authenticity.
The painting analysis project results were first presented at a workshop at the Van Gogh Museum in May 2007. The research team also includes professors and students from Cornell University, Princeton University and Maastricht University in The Netherlands.
Although the research in this field is just starting, Wang said he is confident about its future.
“I believe it is very important to study arts and cultural heritages. Through tackling these tough problems, we can advance the core technologies at the same time,” he said. “I anticipate computer scientists, art historians and mathematicians to collaborate more in the future.”
The project was recently featured on the PBS program NOVA:ScienceNow, where they identified a van Gogh forgery among a group of six paintings.
For more information on the digital painting analysis project, visit: digitalpaintinganalysis.org .
