Information-theoretic analysis of color interaction in artistic paintings

Abstract

Numerous attempts have been made to quantitatively detect harmonious set of colors in painting. However, finding harmony pattern of colors using global color information in painting has limitations in expressing the harmony of colors displayed in small amounts. In this research, we use information-theoretic method to partition a painting into quasi-homogeneous blocks and analyze the color interaction among the sub-blocks to assess color harmony in various scales. We compare our result with the eight harmonic templates defined by D. Cohen-Oret al. [ACM Trans. Graph. 25, 624 (2006)] for three sample paintings. As a result, we revealed that different patterns of color harmony dominate in the paintings depending on the scale of partitions.