Abstract
Considerable evidence has been accumulating that the human visual system has special sensitivity for the radial frequency (RF) patterns, which are deformations of circles defined by sinusoidal modulation of the radius in polar coordinates. RF information plays a critical role in combining retinal images analyzed by the early local linear filters into complex patterns such as faces. Faces are special for the human visual system and they have been in the forefront of art as well. We have archived artworks of representative Korean modern painters and extracted their distinctive styles with respect to RF information of faces in paintings. We then applied these quantitatively defined artists? signatures to authentication of questionable artworks. The results of a scientific approach based on the characteristic of human visual information processing to connoisseurship will be presented. In addition, cognitive evaluation of Korean modern paintings will be discussed with a visual aesthetic viewpoint.
