Automatic art analysis has been mostly focused on classifying artworks into different artistic styles. However, understanding an artistic representation involves more complex processes, such as identifying the elements in the scene or recognizing author influences. We present SemArt, a multi-modal dataset for semantic art understanding. SemArt is a collection of fine-art painting images in which each image is associated to a number of attributes and a textual artistic comment, such as those that appear in art catalogues or museum collections. To evaluate semantic art understanding, we envisage the Text2Art challenge, a multi-modal retrieval task where relevant paintings are retrieved according to an artistic text, and vice versa. We also propose several models for encoding visual and textual artistic representations into a common semantic space. Our best approach is able to find the correct image within the top 10 ranked images in the 45.5% of the test samples. Moreover, our models show remarkable levels of art understanding when compared against human evaluation.
We propose a novel video understanding task by fusing knowledge-based and video question answering. First, we introduce KnowIT VQA, a video dataset with 24,282 human-generated question-answer pairs about a popular sitcom. The dataset combines visual, textual and temporal coherence reasoning together with knowledge-based questions, which need of the experience obtained from the viewing of the series to be answered. Second, we propose a video understanding model by combining the visual and textual video content with specific knowledge about the show. Our main findings are: (i) the incorporation of knowledge produces outstanding improvements for VQA in video, and (ii) the performance on KnowIT VQA still lags well behind human accuracy, indicating its usefulness for studying current video modelling limitations.
Automatic art analysis aims to classify and retrieve artistic representations from a collection of images by using computer vision and machine learning techniques. In this work, we propose to enhance visual representations from neural networks with contextual artistic information. Whereas visual representations are able to capture information about the content and the style of an artwork, our proposed context-aware embeddings additionally encode relationships between different artistic attributes, such as author, school, or historical period. We design two different approaches for using context in automatic art analysis. In the first one, contextual data is obtained through a multi-task learning model, in which several attributes are trained together to find visual relationships between elements. In the second approach, context is obtained through an art-specific knowledge graph, which encodes relationships between artistic attributes. An exhaustive evaluation of both of our models in several art analysis problems, such as author identification, type classification, or cross-modal retrieval, show that performance is improved by up to 7.3% in art classification and 37.24% in retrieval when context-aware embeddings are used.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.