A Deep Approach for Classifying Artistic Media from Artworks

We present a deep CNN-based approach for classifying artistic media from artwork images. We aim to classify most frequently used artistic media including oilpaint brush, watercolor brush, pencil and pastel, etc. For this purpose, we extend VGGNet, one of the most widely used CNN structure, by substituting its last layer with a fully convolutional layer, which reveals class activation map (CAM), the region of classification. We build two artwork image datasets: YMSet that collects more than 4K artwork images for four most frequently used artistic media from various internet websites and WikiSet that collects almost 9K artwork images for ten most frequently used media from WikiArt. We execute a human baseline experiment to compare the classification performance. Through our experiments, we conclude that our classifier is superior in classifying artistic media to human. Keywords: CNN, VGGNet, classification, artistic media, artwork