[tt] CHE: Up Close With Van Gogh

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Up Close With Van Gogh
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8.9.5
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i02/02a00602.htm

By MARIA JOSÉ VIÑAS

Beware, art forgers. Museums will soon be armed with a new tool to detect 
your fake paintings: a sharp-eyed computer program.

An international team of experts in image processing is developing tools 
to help art historians tell originals from counterfeits. The researchers 
published their results in the July issue of IEEE Signal Processing 
Magazine.

C. Richard Johnson Jr., a professor of electrical and computer engineering 
at Cornell University, persuaded officials at the Van Gogh Museum in 
Amsterdam to provide his digital-analysis team with 101 high-resolution 
scans of the painter's works. To guard against digital forgery, the images 
were transmitted in grayscale, a format that represents each color as a 
shade of gray. The researchers divided the scans into sections and 
analyzed such features as texture and brushstroke patterns.

"Painters can use very different kinds of brushwork styles, even for the 
same painting, in a mingling fashion," says James Z. Wang, an associate 
professor of information sciences and technology at Pennsylvania State 
University who led a group of researchers at his institution. That 
heterogeneity made it difficult for the computer to isolate individual 
brushstrokes, says Mr. Wang.

Art experts had already unmistakably identified 23 of the works as Van 
Gogh paintings, so Mr. Wang and his team developed algorithms to identify 
the artist's brushstrokes. They built a statistical model of Van Gogh's 
style that allows researchers to compare any painting to his original 
works. The software, which is still being refined, will assess the 
likelihood that the studied painting is a real Van Gogh.

Mr. Johnson says he hopes his project enhances collaborations among art 
historians and image processors. "As engineers," he says, "we like to show 
up and help people with their problems."