2 RELATED WORKS
2.1 Artistic Style Characterization
In a stylistic painterly non-photorealistic (NPR) sys-
tem, the characterization of artistic style is necessary
for capturing, representing, and remapping a parti-
cular artistic style to an input image. Every digi-
tized paintings can be seen as a composition of two
components: the style and the content (Gatys et al.,
2015). Artistic style characterization process extracts
the style component of digitized paintings as a set of
features. The features are then used by the NPR sys-
tem as a heuristic in the painterly rendering process.
Research done by Hughes et al. (2010) investi-
gated the characterization of artworks done by the
Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder using sparse
coding analysis. The aim of the research was to dis-
tinguish the authentic Bruegel paintings from the im-
itations by determining their similarity of the sparse
model. The sparse model attempts to describe the
image space by training a set of orthogonal basis func-
tions that effectively represent the space. Sparse co-
ding is proven to be an effective method for feature
modelling in drawings and in other two-dimensional
media due to the sparseness of the artworks’ statistical
structures that are considered to give a high contribu-
tion to the perception of similarity.
Sener et al. (2012) extracted various features for
identifying children’s book illustrators. From illustra-
tion samples by authors Alex Scheffler, Debi Gliori,
Dr. Seuss and Korky Paul, features such as 4x4x4
bin RGB histograms, gist (Oliva and Torralba, 2001),
colour dense SIFT (Lowe, 2004) and gradient his-
tograms are extracted. Support Vector Machine with
various kernels are then used for classification. From
their experimentation, it was found that these features
are useful for distinguishing one artist’s style from
another.
The extension of the work of Sener et al. (2012)
by Vieira et al. (2015) uses a set of 93 different fea-
tures extracted from various digital paintings by 12
artists. Among those features are image energy and
entropy along with their statistical properties. Rele-
vant features were selected by measuring the cluster
dispersion using scatter matrices. Image energy and
entropy are proven to be more representative of style
than any other colour-based features. This research
successfully identifies the correlation between several
Baroque painters based on their works.
2.2 Brush Stroke Extraction
Brush strokes are the medium used by painters to
communicate what they want to convey in their pain-
tings. The way they are drawn can also provide some
information related to the painter, for instance the
painter’s art movement and his/her emotional state
(Callen, 1982). Because of this, brush stroke extrac-
tion has an important role in the area of digital pain-
ting analysis since brush strokes contain a lot of in-
formation that can be used as features to represent a
painting.
Li et al. (2012) described a brush stroke extraction
method for distinguishing Van Gogh’s paintings from
his contemporaries. Their method was used for dis-
tinguishing Van Gogh’s paintings from two different
periods, which are Paris and Arles-St.Remy period.
Their work consists of developing statistical frame-
work for the assessment of the distinction level of
different painting categories, brush stroke extraction
algorithm, and numerical features for brush stroke
characterization. They used the EDISON edge de-
tection algorithm developed by Meer and Georgescu
(2001). After edges are detected, edge linking algo-
rithm and enclosing operation are performed in or-
der to close the gaps between edge segments. Then,
the processed edges are extracted using the connected
component labelling. Finally, brush stroke condi-
tions are defined as: the brush skeleton not severely
branched; the ratio of broadness to length is within
the range of [0.05, 1.0]; and the ratio of the brush size
to two times length times width span is within [0.5,
2.0]. The brush skeleton is produced by the thinning
operation of the extracted connected components.
Johnson. et al. (2008) did a mathematical analy-
sis for the classification of Van Gogh paintings. They
examined high resolution grayscale scans of 101 pain-
tings, which consist of: 82 paintings by Van Gogh, 6
paintings by other painters and 13 others which are
loosely classified to be Van Gogh or non-Van Gogh
by art experts. In their research, they combined two
kinds of features that are extracted from the paintings,
which are texture-based feature obtained by wavelets
and stroke-based geometric features obtained by edge
detection. They argue that it is extremely challenging
to locate strokes accurately from grayscale images in
a fully automated manner.
Berezhnoy et al. (2009) elaborated a method
called as prevailing orientation extraction technique
(POET). This method focuses on brush stroke tex-
ture orientation extraction for segmenting individual
brush strokes in Van Gogh’s painting. The method
consists of two stages: the filtering stage and the
orientation extraction stage. In the filtering stage, a
Artistic Style Characterization of Vincent Van Gogh’s Paintings using Extracted Features from Visible Brush Strokes
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