An explorative cultural-image analyzer for detection, visualization, and comparison of historical-color trends

This paper presents an explorative cultural-image analyzer and its application to comparative analyses of cultural arts and crafts. The goal of this system is to provide a new image-exploration environment that reflects the diversity of humans' sense of color and the breadth of cultural human knowledge by detecting and visualizing characteristic historical color-trends within cultural-image data sets. The primary components of this system are the two explorative analysis methods with feature estimation and evaluation of culture-dependent colors: (a) image-group exploration and (b) color exploration. The system visualizes the distinct differences among image groups aggregated by the attributes such as author, era, region, etc. and provides notable images for users through the image-group exploration method. In addition, the system visualizes the subtle differences of colors in images and provides a key to analyze cultural art works by the color-exploration method, with a zooming function for color distributions and cultural-color name estimation. By utilizing the existing annotations and attributes that are available for most images, the system analyzes the differences of colors among image-groups defined by statistical analysis and visualizes the representations of each image-group on an overview map. This system enables a user to analyze the characteristics of a collection of cultural art works by browsing the representative images of each image-group, exploring the specified culture-dependent colors with high accuracy, and observing subtle differences of colors among image-groups according to culture-dependent color names at a glance.