Visual complexity assessment of painting images

In this paper, we propose a framework to assess visual complexity of paintings. This framework provides a machine learning scheme for investigating the relationship between human visual complexity perception and low-level image features. Since the global and local characteristics of paintings affect human´s holistic impression and detail perception, we design a set of methods to extract the features that represent the global and local characteristics of paintings. By feature selection, we look into the role that each image feature plays in assessing visual complexity. Then the selected features are combined by a Support Vector Machine for classification. Experimental results indicate that the proposed work can predict the visual complexity perception of paintings with the accuracy of 88.13%, which is highly close to the assessments given by humans. Compared with the conventional measure of complexity, our approach considers human visual perception and performs more efficiently in assessing visual complexity of painting images.