Where evaluating artistic style was once the exclusive domain of seasoned art historians and art critics with many decades of experience, a computer armed with sophisticated image processing software is making a stir in art circles. Computer scientist, Dr. Lior Shamir of Lawrence Technological University in Michigan authored a recent paper that suggests computers may be just as adept as human art experts at evaluating similarities, and differences, of artistic styles. Dr. Shamir’s breakthrough was to decompose the task of evaluating a painting into discrete quantifiable components that could be assigned a numeric value and hence available for computation. These components, or descriptors, included surface texture, color intensity and type, distribution of lines and edges, and number and types of shapes used in the painting. From the Economist: Dr Shamir, a computer scientist, presented 57 images by each of nine painters—Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst,… Read more