We introduce an emotional stimuli retrieval task that targets extracting emotional regions that evoke people's emotions (i.e., emotional stimuli) in artworks. This task offers new challenges to the community because of the diversity of artwork styles and the subjectivity of emotions, which can be a suitable testbed for benchmarking the capability of the current neural networks to deal with human emotion. For this task, we construct a dataset called APOLO for quantifying emotional stimuli retrieval performance in artworks by crowd-sourcing pixel-level annotation of emotional stimuli. APOLO contains 6,781 emotional stimuli in 4,718 artworks for validation and testing. We also evaluate eight baseline methods, including a dedicated one, to show the difficulties of the task and the limitations of the current techniques through qualitative and quantitative experiments. Our data and methods are available in https://github.com/Tianwei3989/apolo.

In this companion paper, we provide the artifacts of the GOYA model for disentangling content and style in art paintings, as presented at ICMR2023. The scripts are written in Python.

Recently, there has been an increased interest in cross-data research problems, such as predicting air quality using life logging images, predicting congestion using weather and tweets data, and predicting sleep quality using daily exercises and meals. Although several research focusing on multimodal data analytics have been performed, few studies have been conducted on cross-data research (e.g., cross-modal data, cross-domain, cross-platform). The article collection “Intelligent Cross-Data Analysis and Retrieval” aims to encourage research in intelligent cross-data analytics and retrieval and contribute to the creation of a sustainable society. Researchers from diverse domains such as well-being, disaster prevention and mitigation, mobility, climate, tourism and healthcare are welcome to contribute to this Research Topic.

The duality of content and style is inherent to the nature of art. For humans, these two elements are clearly different: content refers to the objects and concepts in the piece of art, and style to the way it is expressed. This duality poses an important challenge for computer vision. The visual appearance of objects and concepts is modulated by the style that may reflect the author’s emotions, social trends, artistic movement, etc., and their deep comprehension undoubtfully requires to handle both. A promising step towards a general paradigm for art analysis is to disentangle content and style, whereas relying on human annotations to cull a single aspect of artworks has limitations in learning semantic concepts and the visual appearance of paintings. We thus present GOYA, a method that distills the artistic knowledge captured in a recent generative model to disentangle content and style. Experiments show that synthetically generated images sufficiently serve as a proxy of the real distribution of artworks, allowing GOYA to separately represent the two elements of art while keeping more information than existing methods.

We have witnessed the rise of cross-data against multimodal data problems recently. The cross-modal retrieval system uses a textual query to look for images; the air quality index can be predicted using lifelogging images; the congestion can be predicted using weather and tweets data; daily exercises and meals can help to predict the sleeping quality are some examples of this research direction. Although vast investigations focusing on multimodal data analytics have been developed, few cross-data (e.g., cross-modal data, cross-domain, cross-platform) research has been carried on. In order to promote intelligent cross-data analytics and retrieval research and to bring a smart, sustainable society to human beings, the specific article collection on "Intelligent Cross-Data Analysis and Retrieval" is introduced. This Research Topic welcomes those who come from diverse research domains and disciplines such as well-being, disaster prevention and mitigation, mobility, climate change, tourism, healthcare, and food computing

The rise of digitization of cultural documents offers large-scale contents, opening the road for development of AI systems in order to preserve, search, and deliver cultural heritage. To organize such cultural content also means to classify them, a task that is very familiar to modern computer science. Contextual information is often the key to structure such real world data, and we propose to use it in form of a knowledge graph. Such a knowledge graph, combined with content analysis, enhances the notion of proximity between artworks so it improves the performances in classification tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel use of a knowledge graph, that is constructed on annotated data and pseudo-labeled data. With label propagation, we boost artwork classification by training a model using a graph convolutional network, relying on the relationships between entities of the knowledge graph. Following a transductive learning framework, our experiments show that relying on a knowledge graph modeling the relations between labeled data and unlabeled data allows to achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple classification tasks on a dataset of paintings, and on a dataset of Buddha statues. Additionally, we show state-of-the-art results for the difficult case of dealing with unbalanced data, with the limitation of disregarding classes with extremely low degrees in the knowledge graph.

Deep hashing has been widely used to approximate nearest-neighbor search for image retrieval tasks. Most of them are trained with image-label pairs without any inter-label relationship, which may not make full use of the real-world data. This paper presents deep hashing, named HA2SH, that leverages multiple types of labels with hierarchical structures that an ethnological museum assigns to their artifacts. We experimentally prove that HA2SH can learn to generate hashes that give a better retrieval performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/wbw520/minpaku.

Automatic art analysis aims to classify and retrieve artistic representations from a collection of images by using computer vision and machine learning techniques. In this work, we propose to enhance visual representations from neural networks with contextual artistic information. Whereas visual representations are able to capture information about the content and the style of an artwork, our proposed context-aware embeddings additionally encode relationships between different artistic attributes, such as author, school, or historical period. We design two different approaches for using context in automatic art analysis. In the first one, contextual data is obtained through a multi-task learning model, in which several attributes are trained together to find visual relationships between elements. In the second approach, context is obtained through an art-specific knowledge graph, which encodes relationships between artistic attributes. An exhaustive evaluation of both of our models in several art analysis problems, such as author identification, type classification, or cross-modal retrieval, show that performance is improved by up to 7.3% in art classification and 37.24% in retrieval when context-aware embeddings are used.