Digital Provenance Research: a computer-assisted image search in auction catalogues

The project

The German Sales database is essential for provenance research, providing access to thousands of auction and sales catalogues. These offer insights into the 20th century art market, make object sales transparent and sometimes also contain information on prices, consignors and buyers. The catalogues can currently be searched in full text. Although this access provides significant added value, changing object titles or artist attributions can hinder searches. Against this background, the project presented here was launched. In a collaboration between the Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies and the Pattern Recognition Lab at Friedrich-Alexander Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg, tests were conducted to determine the extent to which image recognition methods can be used to find images in catalogues using images as search queries. This image-based search aims to provide an additional, complementary access to the source material.

Link to our demonstration

 Fig. 1 illustrates the problem of changing titles, which motivated the project.

First, a neural network for object detection is used to recognise and cut out the images in the catalogues. Figure 2 illustrates this recognition process using an exemplary catalogue page. The visual features of these image sections are then extracted and stored in a database for later use in image searches (see Fig. 3). Features are also extracted from the selected search image and compared with those stored in the database. Finally, the images whose features are most similar to those of the search image are displayed. This search method is extremely valuable for provenance research as it provides an additional, quick access to source material, independent of changing titles or artist attributions. Furthermore, the method can be extended to other sources, such as exhibition catalogues, catalogues raisonnés, art magazines or primary market sources. As well as reconstructing provenance, the method can help to answer other questions concerning, for example, the focus of individual auction houses, contemporary tastes, price developments, object movements and image similarities.

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