Computer Vision Applications for Art History: Reflections and paradigms for future research

Abstract

One of the contributing factors to the continuing debate among art historians over the use of computational methods in art history research is that they do not consider the core of today's art history research questions. The lack of close collaboration between the two involved research communities makes the definition of contemporary art-historical methods as well-defined computer vision problems extremely difficult. For that purpose, it is devised as a methodology to study articles in art history journals from a computer science perspective. The objective is to identify which image features art historians utilise within their research and describe them in immediate and meaningful terms to the computer vision research community. Finally, some paradigms that could serve as a new starting point for exploring how computer vision applications for art history can address the core of today's art history research are given.