Style classification and visualization of art painting’s genre using self-organizing maps

Abstract With the spread of digitalization of art paintings, research on diverse scientific approaches on painted images has become active. In this paper, the method of classifying painting styles by extracting various features from paintings is suggested. Global features are extracted using the color-based statistical computation and composition-based local features of paintings are extracted through the segmentation of objects within the paintings to classify the styles of the paintings. Based on the extracted features, paintings are categorized by style using SOM, which are then analyzed through visualization using the map. We have proved the feasibility of the proposed method of categorizing paintings by style, and the objective features of paintings can contribute to the research on art history and aesthetics.