Could you distinguish a painting by Leonardo da Vinci from a painting by Dürer, even if you had not seen them before? New software developed by the University of Haifa is capable. It is enough for the program to “study” a few works by each artist to identify (and archive) the traits of their individual and unique style. Then, faced with an unknown painting, the computer transforms the lines into a complex series of mathematical symbols, sines and cosines, before offering its pictorial “verdict” . “As soon as he learns to recognize Dalí’s clock drawings, he is able to identify other paintings by the Catalan artist, even without clocks,” explains Daniel Keren, creator of the software.
The advanced program has been developed applying the latest knowledge in computer vision , a field “very complex and multifaceted” according to Keren, who ensures that the capacity of the machines is still much lower than that of the human eye. “Human vision has been subjected to millions of years of evolution, and our field is only 30 years old,” he justifies. And he adds that, at this stage, computers still have difficulty doing “things as simple as recognizing the image of a human face.”
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