  In the past few years, the number of fine-art collections that are digitized
and publicly available has been growing rapidly. With the availability of such
large collections of digitized artworks comes the need to develop multimedia
systems to archive and retrieve this pool of data. Measuring the visual
similarity between artistic items is an essential step for such multimedia
systems, which can benefit more high-level multimedia tasks. In order to model
this similarity between paintings, we should extract the appropriate visual
features for paintings and find out the best approach to learn the similarity
metric based on these features. We investigate a comprehensive list of visual
features and metric learning approaches to learn an optimized similarity
measure between paintings. We develop a machine that is able to make
aesthetic-related semantic-level judgments, such as predicting a painting's
style, genre, and artist, as well as providing similarity measures optimized
based on the knowledge available in the domain of art historical
interpretation. Our experiments show the value of using this similarity measure
for the aforementioned prediction tasks.
