David Stork
When Computers Look at Art: The role of image science in humanistic studies of the visual arts

Friday, October 5th, 3pm
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/238860/

ABSTRACT:
A number of recent questions and controversies have highlighted the value of rigorous image analysis in the service of the studies of art, particularly painting, for example: the fractal image analysis for the authentication of drip paintings possibly by Jackson Pollock; sophisticated perspective, shading and form analysis to address claims that early Renaissance masters such as Jan van Eyck or Baroque masters such as Georges de la Tour traced optically projected images; automatic multi-scale analysis of brushstrokes for the attribution of portraits within a painting by Perugino; and multi-spectral, x-ray and infra-red scanning and image analysis of the Mona Lisa to reveal the painting techniques of Leonardo. The value of image analysis to these and other questions strongly suggests that current and future computer methods will play an ever larger role in the scholarship of visual art. There are many opportunities for computer vision research of art. This talk will describe the application of rigorous computer vision and image analysis algorithms to masterpieces by Leonardo, Georges de la Tour, Jan van Eyck, Jan Vermeer and others to detect forgeries, understand the working methods of artists and much more. You may never see paintings the same way again.

BIO:
David G. Stork is Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations and Visiting Lecturer at Stanford University, where he has taught "Light, Color and Visual Phenomena," "Pattern Classification," "Optics, perspective and Renaissance painting," and other courses. He studied art history at Wellesley College and was Artist-in-Residence through the New York State Council of the Arts. He holds 35 patents and his five books include Seeing the Light: Optics in Nature, Photography, Color, Vision and Holography with D. Falk and D. Brill and Pattern Classification (2nd ed.) with R. Duda and P. Hart. He is co-chair of the first symposium on Computer image analysis in the study of art (January, 2008). He created the PBS television documentary 2001: HAL's Legacy based on his book HAL's Legacy: 2001's computer as dream and reality.

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