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Article
Contemporary Art Authentication With Large-Scale Classification
Big Data and Cognitive Computing
  • Todd Dobbs, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
  • Abdullah-Al-Raihan Nayeem, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
  • Isaac Cho, Utah State University
  • Zbigniew Ras, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Document Type
Article
Publisher
MDPI AG
Publication Date
10-9-2023
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
Disciplines
Abstract

Art authentication is the process of identifying the artist who created a piece of artwork and is manifested through events of provenance, such as art gallery exhibitions and financial transactions. Art authentication has visual influence via the uniqueness of the artist’s style in contrast to the style of another artist. The significance of this contrast is proportional to the number of artists involved and the degree of uniqueness of an artist’s collection. This visual uniqueness of style can be captured in a mathematical model produced by a machine learning (ML) algorithm on painting images. Art authentication is not always possible as provenance can be obscured or lost through anonymity, forgery, gifting, or theft of artwork. This paper presents an image-only art authentication attribute marker of contemporary art paintings for a very large number of artists. The experiments in this paper demonstrate that it is possible to use ML-generated models to authenticate contemporary art from 2368 to 100 artists with an accuracy of 48.97% to 91.23%, respectively. This is the largest effort for image-only art authentication to date, with respect to the number of artists involved and the accuracy of authentication.

Citation Information
Dobbs, T.; Nayeem, A.-A.-R.; Cho, I.; Ras, Z. Contemporary Art Authentication with Large-Scale Classification. Big Data Cogn. Comput. 2023, 7, 162. https://doi.org/10.3390/bdcc7040162