The mobile museum guide: Artwork recognition with eigenpaintings and SURF

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of eigenpaintings, SURF and a combination of both methods in a query-bypicture system dedicated to artwork images. For this purpose a database containing photographs of 17 artworks was created. These photos were taken by visitors of the exhibition \u93The VUB Art Collection \u96 On Display and in Your Hand\u94 using the camera of a mobile phone. The resulting images present several challenging aspects, including reflections, different light conditions, variations in perspective viewing conditions etc. Experiments show that the method based on eigenpaintings classifies 85% of the artworks correctly and the method based on SURF 84%. The combined classifier shows an accuracy of 88%