Spotting a forged painting usually takes an expert eye and hours of analysis. That could change with a computer program that analyses artwork for signs of an artist鈥檚 unique style. The software, called Authentic, can also help date paintings by a particular artist.
鈥淲e鈥檙e trying to have a replica of an art expert that helps them to do the dirty work and supplements what they are doing,鈥� says Igor Berezhnoy at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who developed the system with colleagues Eric Postma and Jaap van den Herik.
The team used the software to analyse the use of colours, brush strokes and canvas types in more than 180 Van Gogh paintings. In one test the team studied the way Van Gogh used the complementary colour pairs red-green and blue-yellow to emphasise contours. By dividing 145 digitised paintings into pixels and analysing the colours of each and how they compared with nearby pixels, the system was able to spot patterns unique to the painter. The software also showed that Van Gogh鈥檚 use of complementary colours increased during his most active period, from 1885 to 1890 (Pattern Recognition Letters, DOI: 101016/jpatrec.2006.08.002). 鈥淲e believe that a subconscious signature of the painter exists,鈥� says Berezhnoy.
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The team has now added a neural network to the system, which has been trained on Van Gogh鈥檚 paintings to spot the characteristic structure of his brush strokes. In tests Authentic performed as well as 15 human volunteers, who were each given a small segment of a painting to study.
