Classification of Paintings Authorship Using Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

In this paper, state-of-the-art architectures of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are explained and compared concerning authorship classification of famous paintings. The chosen CNNs architectures were VGG-16, VGG-19, Residual Neural Networks (ResNet), and Xception. The used dataset is available on the website Kaggle, under the title “Best Artworks of All Time”. Weighted classes for each artist with more than 200 paintings present in the dataset were created to represent and classify each artist’s style. The performed experiments resulted in an accuracy of up to 95% for the Xception architecture with an average F1-score of 0.87, 92% of accuracy with an average F1-score of 0.83 for the ResNet in its 50-layer configuration, while both of the VGG architectures did not present satisfactory results for the same amount of epochs, achieving at most 60% of accuracy.