Computer Vision and Art

As a scientific researcher interested in computer vision and art, the author spent the last seven years working with David Hockney, an artist of whom a respected source writes that "his drawings and etchings are amongst the deftest of this century; posterity may well acclaim him the greatest of modern portraitists". Together, Hockney and the author have proposed and provided supporting evidence for a hypothesis, controversial in the art history world, that optical projections were used as aids in making paintings as early as c. 1425. In David Stork\´s recent three-part series, he uses our findings as a sounding board for discussing his own research on computer vision and art. Briefly, his premise is that his research shows there are alternatives to our optical projection hypothesis that explain the data just as well. In this article the author shows serious errors with Stork\´s research described in his three-part series. He also clarifies the hypothesis that he and Hockney have actually proposed