Bruegel´s drawings under the multifractal microscope

Recently, a growing interest in the exploration of the potential of signal or image processing tools for the purposes of art analysis has emerged. The wavelet leader based multifractal analysis consists of a mathematical tool recently introduced in image processing for the characterization of homogeneous textures based on their regularity properties. Here, this novel tool is applied to a set of digitized versions of drawings, made available by the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art, consisting of authentic Bruegel drawings and several imitations. Multifractal attributes are estimated from several patches of each of these drawings, and their ability to discriminate authentic drawings from impostors is investigated by means of subspace projections and quadratic discriminant analysis. Besides showing very satisfactory performance, the achieved discrimination provides interesting insights into the differences between the regularity of the textures of authentic Bruegel drawings versus imitations, potentially relating the fractal properties of the drawings to the artist´s drawing style.