Aesthetic Appraisal of Art - from Eye Movements to Computers

Wallraven, Christian; Cunningham, Douglas W.; Rigau, Jaume; Feixas, Miquel; Sbert, Mateu

Aesthetic Appraisal of Art - from Eye Movements to Computers

Files

137-144.pdf (689.78 KB)

Date

2009

Authors

Wallraven, Christian
Cunningham, Douglas W.
Rigau, Jaume
Feixas, Miquel
Sbert, Mateu

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

By looking at a work of art, an observer enters into a dialogue. In this work, we attempt to analyze this dialogue with both behavioral and computational tools. In two experiments, observers were asked to look at a large number of paintings from different art periods and to rate their visual complexity, or their aesthetic appeal. During these two tasks, their eye movements were recorded. The complexity and aesthetic ratings show clear preferences for certain artistic styles and were based on both low-level and high-level criteria. Eye movements reveal the time course of the aesthetic dialogue as observers try to interpret and understand the painting. Computational analyses of both the ratings (using measures derived from information theory) and the eye tracking data (using two models of saliency) showed that our computational tools are already able to explain some properties of this dialogue.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/COMPAESTH/COMPAESTH09/137-144
,
booktitle = {Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging
},
editor = {Oliver Deussen and Peter Hall
},
title = {{Aesthetic Appraisal of Art - from Eye Movements to Computers
}},
author = {Wallraven, Christian and 
Cunningham, Douglas W. and 
Rigau, Jaume and 
Feixas, Miquel and 
Sbert, Mateu
},
year = {2009
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1816-0859
},
ISBN = {978-3-905674-17-0
},
DOI = {/10.2312/COMPAESTH/COMPAESTH09/137-144
}
}