Image processing for artist identification

A survey of the literature reveals that image processing tools aimed at supplementing the art historian´s toolbox are currently in the earliest stages of development. To jump-start the development of such methods, the Van Gogh and Kroller-Muller museums in The Netherlands agreed to make a data set of 101 high-resolution gray-scale scans of paintings within their collections available to groups of image processing researchers from several different universities. This article describes the approaches to brushwork analysis and artist identification developed by three research groups, within the framework of this data set.