A Digital Technique for Art Authentication

S. Lyu, D. Rockmore and H. Farid

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(49):17006-17010, 2004

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We describe a computational technique for authenticating works of art, specifically, paintings and drawings, from high resolution digital scans of the original works. This approach builds a statistical model of an artist from the scans of a set of authenticated works, against which new works are then compared. The statistical model consists of first- and higher-order wavelet statistics. We show preliminary results from our analysis of thirteen drawings that have at various times been attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which confirm expert authentications. We also apply these techniques to the problem of determining the number of artists that may have contributed to a painting attributed to Perugino and again achieve an analysis agreeing with expert opinion.