An image classification approach for painting using improved convolutional neural algorithm

The widespread availability of digitized fine art collections in museums and galleries has generated a demand for efficient software tools. These tools enable rapid retrieval and semantic classification of art images. Traditional image classification methods often rooted in shallow structure learning algorithms offer the capacity to extract various image features. However, there is need for deep understanding of fundamental painting knowledge during this process due to the reason that certain features may be lost. In this paper, we present an innovating approach for classifying digital paintings based on artist attribution. Our approach centers on the creations of multi-scale pyramid representation derived from a given painting image which facilitate the incorporation of both global and local information within a single image. The training of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) algorithm is performed for the assignment of class labels on each level of the pyramid. To establish connections among localized image patches, we use Markov Random Fields through the optimization of the Gibbs energy function. We validate the proposed approach which referred to as the multi-scale CNN framework using fusion-based Markov random field using two challenging painting image datasets: WikiArt and Web Gallery of Art (WGA). The proposed model archives better results using WikiArt dataset for painting image classification, i.e., precision (74.12%), recall (70.23%), F1-score (72.65%), and accuracy (80.00%). Using Web Gallery of Art (WGA) dataset for painting image classification, the model achieves the following results: precision (75.88%), recall (77.25%), F1-score (76.44%), and accuracy (78.00%). Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods excelling not only in image classification but also in terms of computational efficiency.