Perceptual and Computational Categories in Art

Wallraven, Christian; Cunningham, Douglas W.; Fleming, Roland

Perceptual and Computational Categories in Art

Files

131-138.pdf (338.64 KB)

Date

2008

Authors

Wallraven, Christian
Cunningham, Douglas W.
Fleming, Roland

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

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 several perceptual experiments with the goal of determining whether such categories also have a perceptual foundation. Following experimental methods from perceptual psychology on category formation, naive, non-expert participants were 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 perceptual categories which did in some cases correspond to canonical art periods. Initial results from a comparison with several computational algorithms for image analysis and scene categorization are also reported.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/COMPAESTH/COMPAESTH08/131-138
,
booktitle = {Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging
},
editor = {Douglas W. Cunningham and Victoria Interrante and Paul Brown and Jon McCormack
},
title = {{Perceptual and Computational Categories in Art
}},
author = {Wallraven, Christian and 
Cunningham, Douglas W. and 
Fleming, Roland
},
year = {2008
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1816-0859
},
ISBN = {978-3-905674-08-8
},
DOI = {/10.2312/COMPAESTH/COMPAESTH08/131-138
}
}