Visual Art and Cultural Heritages

The group has been keenly interested in studying visual art and art history using advanced computational methods. Since the early 2000s, the group has been collaborating with art historians on studying some of the most significant visual artworks and cultural heritages. They have generated some high-impact research results, including the analysis of Vincent van Gogh's brushstroke styles and the determining of the sextual identities of prehistoric cave artists using handprints.

The following is an archive of our publications in this area. They are in reverse chronical order.

  1. Zhuomin Zhang, Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Jia Li, John Russell, George S. Young, Catherine Adams, Kevin A. Bowley and James Z. Wang, ``A Machine Learning Paradigm for Studying Pictorial Realism: How Accurate Are Constable's Clouds?,'' IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, under second-round review, 2022. [A version was posted in February 2022 at https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.09348.] (download) (g-scholar)
  2. Zhuomin Zhang, Jia Li, David G. Stork, Elizabeth C. Mansfield, John Russell, Catherine Adams and James Z. Wang, ``Reducing Bias in AI-based Analysis of Visual Artworks,'' IEEE BITS the Information Theory Magazine, Special Issue on Information Processing in Arts and Humanities, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 36-48, 2022. (download) (g-scholar)
  3. Elizabeth C. Mansfield, with Zhuomin Zhang, Jia Li, John Russell, George S. Young, Catherine Adams and James Z. Wang, ``Techniques of the Art Historical Observer,'' Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 125-136, 2022. [invited] (download) (g-scholar)
  4. James Z. Wang, Baris Kandemir and Jia Li, ``Computerized Analysis of Paintings,'' The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, Kathryn Brown (editor), Routledge, Chapter 22, pp. 299-312, 2020. (download) (g-scholar)
  5. Xin Lu, Neela Sawant, Michelle G. Newman, Reginald B. Adams, Jr., James Z. Wang and Jia Li, ``Identifying Emotions Aroused from Paintings,'' Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 9913, G. Hua and H. Jegou (eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Visual Analysis of Sketches, in conjunction with the European Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 48-63, Springer, 2016. (download) (g-scholar)
  6. Jia Li, Lei Yao, Ella Hendriks and James Z. Wang, ``Rhythmic Brushstrokes Distinguish van Gogh from His Contemporaries: Findings via Automated Brushstroke Extraction,'' IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 1159-1176, 2012. [DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2011.203.] (download) (g-scholar)
  7. Guifang Duan, Neela Sawant, James Z. Wang, Dean Snow, Danni Ai and Yen-Wei Chen, ``Analysis of Cypriot Icon Faces using ICA-Enhanced Active Shape Model Representation,'' Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Conference, pp. 901-904, Scottsdale, Arizona, ACM, November 2011. (download) (g-scholar)
  8. James Z. Wang, Weina Ge, Dean Snow, Prasenjit Mitra and C. Lee Giles, ``Determining the Sexual Identities of Prehistoric Cave Artists using Digitized Handprints -- A Machine Learning Approach,'' Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Conference, pp. 1325-1332, Florence, Italy, ACM, October 2010. (download) (g-scholar)
  9. Lei Yao, Jia Li and James Z. Wang, ``Characterizing Elegance of Curves Computationally for Distinguishing Morrisseau Paintings and the Imitations,'' Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Special Session on Cultural Heritage, pp. 73-76, 2009. (download) (g-scholar)
  10. C. Richard Johnson, Jr., Ella Hendriks, Igor Berezhnoy, Eugene Brevdo, Shannon Hughes, Ingrid Daubechies, Jia Li, Eric Postma and James Z. Wang, ``Image Processing for Artist Identification - Computerized Analysis of Vincent van Gogh's Painting Brushstrokes,'' IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Special Issue on Visual Cultural Heritage, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 37-48, 2008. (download) (g-scholar)
  11. Dean R. Snow, Mark Gahegan, C. Lee Giles, Kenneth G. Hirth, George R. Milner, Prasenjit Mitra and James Z. Wang, ``Cybertools and Archaeology,'' Science, vol. 311, issue. 5763, pp. 958-959, February 17, 2006. (download) (g-scholar)
  12. James Z. Wang, Kurt Grieb, Ya Zhang, Ching-chih Chen, Yixin Chen and Jia Li, ``Machine Annotation and Retrieval for Digital Imagery of Historical Materials,'' International Journal on Digital Libraries, Special Issue on Multimedia Contents and Management in Digital Libraries, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 18-29, Springer-Verlag, 2006. (download) (g-scholar)
  13. Ching-chih Chen, Howard Wactlar, James Z. Wang and Kevin Kiernan, ``Digital Imagery for Significant Cultural and Historical Materials,'' International Journal on Digital Libraries, Special Issue: Towards the New Generation Digital Libraries: Recommendations of the US-NSF/EU-DELOS Working Groups, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 275-286, 2005. (download) (g-scholar)
  14. Jia Li and James Z. Wang, ``Studying Digital Imagery of Ancient Paintings by Mixtures of Stochastic Models,'' IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 340-353, 2004. (download) (g-scholar)
  15. James Z. Wang, Jia Li and Ching-chih Chen, ``Machine Annotation for Digital Imagery of Historical Materials Using the ALIP System,'' Proceedings of the DELOS-NSF Workshop on Multimedia in Digital Libraries, 5 pages, Crete, Greece, 2003. In e-proceedings. [invited] (download) (g-scholar)
  16. Ching-chih Chen and James Z. Wang, ``Large-Scale Emperor Digital Library and Semantics-Sensitive Region-Based Retrieval,'' Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Library -- IT Opportunities and Challenges in the New Millennium, pp. 454-462, Beijing, China, July 9-11, 2002. (download) (g-scholar)
  17. James Z. Wang, Jia Li and Ching-chih Chen, ``Interdisciplinary Research to Advance Digital Imagery Indexing and Retrieval Technologies for Asian Art and Cultural Heritages,'' Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval, in conjunction with ACM Multimedia, 6 pages, Juan Les Pins, France, ACM, December 2002. [invited] (download) (g-scholar)
  18. DELOS-NSF Working Group, ``Research on Digital Imagery for Significant Cultural and Historical Materials,'' DELOS-NSF Working Group Reports, 19 pages, Boston, MA, December 2002. (download) (g-scholar)

In the midst of difficulty lies opportunity. - Albert Einstein

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