Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • News & Views
  • Published:

Applied mathematics

The statistics of style

Nature volume 463, pages 1027–1028 (2010)Cite this article

Subjects

A mathematical method has been developed that distinguishes between the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and those of his imitators. But can the approach be used to spot imitations of works by any artist?

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Sparse-coding analysis of artistic style.

References

  1. Hughes, J. M., Graham, D. J. & Rockmore, D. N. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 107, 1279–1283 (2010).

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Field, D. J. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 4, 2379–2394 (1987).

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Ruderman, D. L. Network Comput. Neural Syst. 5, 517–548 (1994).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Geisler, W. S. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 59, 167–192 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Hyvärinen, A., Hurri, J. & Hoyer, P. O. Natural Image Statistics: A Probabilistic Approach to Early Computational Vision (Springer, 2009).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  6. Taylor, R. P., Micolich, A. P. & Jonas, D. Nature 399, 422 (1999).

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  7. Lyu, S., Rockmore, D. & Farid, H. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 101, 17006–17010 (2004).

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  8. Olshausen, B. A. & Field, D. J. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 14, 481–487 (2004).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. Karklin, Y. & Lewicki, M. S. Nature 457, 83–86 (2009).

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Cadieu, C. F. & Olshausen, B. A. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 21, 209–216 (2009).

    Google Scholar 

  11. Portilla, J. & Simoncelli, E. P. Int. J. Computer Vision 40, 49–71 (2000).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Optometry (B.A.O.) and Department of Physics (M.R.D.), Bruno A. Olshausen and Michael R. DeWeese are at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA. baolshausen@berkeley.edu; deweese@berkeley.edu,

    Bruno A. Olshausen & Michael R. DeWeese

Authors
  1. Bruno A. Olshausen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Michael R. DeWeese
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Olshausen, B., DeWeese, M. The statistics of style. Nature 463, 1027–1028 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/4631027a

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/4631027a

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing AI and Robotics

Sign up for the Nature Briefing: AI and Robotics newsletter — what matters in AI and robotics research, free to your inbox weekly.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing: AI and Robotics