Warping realist art to ensure consistent perspective: A new software tool for art investigations

Interactive perspective correction of the Ghent Altarpiece (closed view) using our software tool.

Interactive perspective correction of the Ghent Altarpiece (closed view) using our software tool.

Yu-Sung Chang† and David G. Stork‡

†Wolfram Research, Inc., 100 Trade Center Drive, Champaign, IL
‡Rambus Labs, 1050 Enterprise Way, Suite 700, Sunnyvale, CA

SPIE Electronic Imaging: Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XVII, San Francisco, January 22-26, 2012

We developed a software tool for art scholars studying geometrical perspective in realist art. Our software, written in Mathematica, accepts a digital image of an artwork that may not obey the rigorous rules of geometrical prospective. The user/scholar marks perspective lines on the work and then adjusts a control slider, thereby warping this image so as to ensure consistent perspective, i.e., so that perspective lines indeed meet at proper vanishing points, such vanishing points lie along a horizon lines, and so forth. Scholars can adjust the amount of warping dynamically and continuously between no warping and full geometric correction. Moreover, the user can select the polynomial order of image interpolation. In this way, the software helps reveal where and how the artist has deviated from the rigorous rules of geometrical perspective, and thus sheds light upon the artist’s compositional style. We demonstrate our method on pre-Renaissance paintings, such as works by Pietro Lorenzetti.