Curvature-based authentication of van Gogh paintings

Art authentication is the identification of genuine paintings by famous artists from the forgeries. In this paper, we introduce a novel curvature-based method to authenticate van Gogh paintings. We use curvature images to capture the shape information in the paintings. For each painting, we convert it from RGB to HSI color space. The features we propose are two simple statistics of the three parts: including (i) the H, S, I color information, (ii) their corresponding first order derivatives in x,y directions, and (iii) the corresponding 2D curvature images. In order to select the appropriate features for art authentication, we use a forward stage-wise feature selection method such that van Gogh paintings are highly concentrated and forgeries are spread around as outliers. Numerical results show that our method gives the 88.61% classification accuracy, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for art authentication so far.