Towards Understanding Beautiful Things: A Computational Approach for the Study of Color Modulation in Visual Art

Abstract

This paper is a guided attempt at analyzing the aesthetics of color from the perspective of color theory. Our guides are the works of Johannes Itten, one of the most influential theorists of color aesthetics. We focus on one specific aspect of color usage in visual art, namely color modulation. To this purpose, we introduce the color palette, a novel 3D visualization of the chromatic information of an image in the HSL space. Moreover, we propose a set of simple descriptors for evaluating color modulation. Our approach is demonstrated on two case studies, which show that our measures on modulation are consistent with Itten s color theory. Ongoing work involves a thorough experimental exploration of the proposed color palette and modulation descriptors, in terms of their ability to discriminate between different artists and painting styles.