This paper describes a Mixed Reality-supported interactive museum exhibit. Using an easy and intuitive pointing gesture recognition system, the museum visitor is able to create his/her own exhibit choosing between different painters, artistic topics or just between different images. The usage of a video-based gesture tracking system ensures a seamless integration of Mixed Reality technologies i...

The visual effects of lighting on art paintings is an important aspect that should be considered by museum curators. The aim of this work was to determine the correlated color temperature (CCT) of daylight illumination preferred by observers when appreciating art paintings. Hyperspectral images of 11 oil paintings were collected at the museum, and the appearance of the paintings under daylight ...

We compare the properties of intensity and color edges in photographs of real scenes and paintings. We demonstrate that paintings contain significantly more color-only edges, whereas the amount of intensity-only edges does not differ significantly between the two classes. In addition, color edge strength is significantly higher for paintings. The differences between paintings and photographs ar...

When we consider the grand trajectory of Western painting, we see something very interesting taking place at the dawn of the Renaissance. Before roughly 1425, most images were rather stylized, even schematic, but afterward we see paintings that have an almost photographic realism. For instance, Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfi ni and His Wife, by the early Renaissance master Jan van Eyck (1390?–144...

Traditional Chinese painting (TCP) is the gem of Chinese traditional arts. More and more TCP images are digitized and exhibited on the Internet. Effectively browsing and retrieving them is an important problem that needs to be addressed. Gongbi (traditional Chinese realistic painting) and Xieyi (freehand style) are two basic types of traditional Chinese paintings. This paper proposes a scheme t...

Statistical analysis of art, particularly of the abstract genre, is becoming an increasingly important tool for understanding the image creation process. We present a multifractal clustering analysis of non-representational images painted by adults and children using a ‘pouring’ technique. The effective dimensions (D0) are measured for each, as is the associated multifractal depth ΔD = D0 D∞. I...

Frames provide a visual link between artworks and their surround. We asked how image properties change as an observer zooms out from viewing a painting alone, to viewing the painting with its frame and, finally, the framed painting in its museum environment (museum scene). To address this question, we determined three higher-order image properties that are based on histograms of oriented lumina...

Indeterminate art, in which familiar objects are only suggestive, invokes a perceptual conundrum as apparently detailed and vivid images resist identification. We hypothesized that compared with paintings that depict meaningful content, object recognition in indeterminate images would be delayed, and tested whether aesthetic affect depends on meaningful content. Subjects performed object recogn...

When Renaissance painters solved the problem of depicting three-dimensional (3D) scenes on flat canvases, their paintings blossomed into realistic representations of the world. Our brain must solve this problem every day to reconstruct 3D views from images that fall on the 2D surface of our retinas. Researchers have long known that we use various cues to accomplish this, such as the stereoscopi...