Now, computers can appreciate art too!

Washington, November 6: Researchers at the University of Haifa have developed a mathematical program that can enables computers to detect whether or not a piece of art has been created by a particular famous artist, as claimed by its seller.

"The field of computer vision is very complex and multifaceted. We hope that our new development is another step forward in this field," said Prof. Daniel Keren who developed the program.

With the help of their program, the researchers "taught" the computer to identify the artworks of different artists. The program enabled them to do so by turning the drawings of nature, people, flowers and other scenes to a series of mathematical symbols, sines and cosines.

Thereafter, the program enables the computer to master the individual style of each artist, and to identify the artist by looking at other works that it had never been exposed to earlier.

Professor Keren says that the program can identify the works of a specific artist even if they depict different scenes.

"As soon as the computer learns to recognize the clock drawings of Dali, it will recognize his other paintings, even without clocks. As soon as the computer learns to recognize the swirls of Van Gogh, it will recognize them in pictures it has never seen before," he said.

According to him, this new development is a step forward in the field of computer vision.

He, however, admits that the field of computer vision is still inferior to human vision.

"Human vision has undergone evolution of millions of years and our field is only 30 years old. At this stage computers still have difficulty doing things that are very simple for people, for example, recognizing a picture of a human face. A computer has difficulty identifying when a picture is of a human face or how many faces are in a picture. However, computers are very good at simulating and sketching 3 dimensional images like the arteries in the brain or a road network," said Professor Keren.

The researchers say that the new program may be helpful to someone who appreciates art, but not to a real expert in the field.