Relate that image: A tool for finding related cultural heritage images

Abstract

Museums,galleries, art centers, etc. are increasingly seeing the benefits of digitalizing their art work collections –and acting on it. The more visible benefits usually have to do with advertising, involving the citizens, or creating interactive tools that get people interested in coming to museums or buying art. With the availability of these increasingly large collections, analysis of art images has gained attention from researchers.This master thesis proposes a tool to recommend paintingsthat are similar to a given image of an artwork. We define different similarity measures that include criteria existent in the metadata associated with the digitized pictures (e.g. style, genre, artist, etc.), but also image content similarity. The work is more closely related to existing approaches on automatic classification of paintings, but also shares techniques with other areas such as image clustering. Our goal is to offer a tool that can enable creative uses, support the work of gallery / museum curators, help create interesting and interactive educational content, or create clusters of images as training sets for further learning and analysis algorithms.