Arthistorian: an Integrated Indexing and Personalized Browsing System for Art Paintings

This paper introduces ArtHistorian, an art painting indexing system designed for automatic generation of dynamic painting presentations. The developed system aims personalized content browsing with a classification based indexing and query method implemented from the art historians’ perspective. ArtHistorian represents the visual content of paintings by a 6-D feature vector that is robust to scale changes and can handle variations in lighting conditions. A nonlinear SVM classifier included in the system learns the characteristics of fundamental art movements, painters and painting styles. Automatically generating indexes based on the classification results, the system creates an efficient storage environment that enables the user to run content-based queries and to retrieve materials from extensive painting records. Thus, it is very suitable for Internet art collections and active Web museums.