Original or copy?

Art historians are in luck. James Z. Wang, professor of information technology, and statistician Jia Li have devised software that allows you to distinguish an original work from a simple one of your own , and that will facilitate the identification of the painter of paintings of doubtful authorship.

Scientists used 101 high-resolution grayscale digitized images of Vincent van Gogh paintings to search for the artist’s “fingerprint” or, in other words, what makes it unmistakable. After analyzing the paintings based on the patterns and the geometry of the brushstrokes, they achieved their objective. Results are published in the July issue of IEEE Signal Processing .

The data extracted from the analysis of van Gogh’s works has been compiled in an online software that allows us to analyze any painting to determine if it belongs to the Dutch painter. In the future, this same system could be applied to establish the authenticity of paintings attributed to other artists.

“I think it is important to study art and cultural heritage with the help of technology,” says Wang, who predicts that “in the future computer scientists, historians and mathematicians will collaborate much more.”