Computer Vision, ML, and AI in the Study of Fine Art

Advances in imaging technology and especially CV and AI have, for decades, benefited nearly every scientific and engineering discipline, including medicine, geology, biology, chemistry, and psychology. Consider that works of art bear the most memorable and important images ever created by humans, and many works themselves are exceedingly valuable--not just financially but culturally. It is natural, then, that computer methods, properly guided by scholars' knowledge of history and context, should be of service in the humanistic studies of art as well. In fact, in the past few years, rigorous automated image analysis has assisted some art historians, critics, and connoisseurs in their scholarly studies of fine-art paintings and drawings. Such rigorous computer image analysis of fine art is rather different from traditional "digital humanities," which has generally concentrated on digital methods of capture and display but where the fundamental analyses and interpretations are still performed by human scholars and connoisseurs.38