Novel expert based approach to image analysis

The hands and minds of all painters are intimately involved in the creative process, making paintings intrinsically complex to analyze. Although tracing projected images is known to have become a common technique by the 19th century, earlier use of optics has been difficult to identify and analyze, hindered also by the lack of interaction between art historians and scientists. In spite of this difficulty, the painter David Hockney and I recently identified optical evidence within a number of paintings demonstrating artists as early as Jan van Eyck (c1425) used optical projections as aids for producing portions of their images. While making these discoveries, Hockney and I developed fundamentally new insights into image analysis. As discussed in this paper, I am now applying these new insights to problems in computerized image display and analysis.