Big Transfer Learning for Fine Art Classification

Automatic classification and retrieval of fine art collections have received much attention in recent years. In this article, we explore the applicability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for art-related image classification tasks. To examine how hyperparameters affect model performance, we use different hyperparameters in our experiments and find that a higher resolution and appropriate training steps with mix-up can improve model performance. To determine how transfer learning affects the final results, we systematically compare the efforts of five weight initializations of the models for different tasks. We show that fine-tuning networks pretrained on a larger dataset have better generalizability. This phenomenon shows the a priori knowledge that models learn in the real world also applies to the art world, and we call this method as big transfer learning (BiT). Through extensive experiments on fine art classification, we demonstrate that the proposed transfer learning approach outperforms the previous work by a large margin and achieves state-of-the-art performance in the art field. Furthermore, to show how computers capture features in paintings to make classifications, we visualized the results of different classification tasks to help us understand the operation mechanism of the models. Additionally, we use our models to retrieve paintings by analyzing different image similarity aspects. The results show that models can be employed to retrieve paintings even if they are computer-generated.