ARt Image Exploration Space

About

Art historians have traditionally used physical light boxes to prepare exhibits or curate collections. On a light box, they can place slides or printed images, move the images around at will, group them as desired, and visually compare them. The transition to digital images has rendered this workflow obsolete. Now, art historians lack well-designed, unified interactive software tools that effectively support the operations they perform with physical light boxes.

To address this problem, we designed ARIES - ARt Image Exploration Space, an interactive image manipulation system that enables the exploration and organization of fine digital art. The system allows images to be compared in multiple ways, offering dynamic overlays analogous to a physical light box, and supporting advanced image comparisons and feature-matching functions, available through computational image processing.

ARIES was presented at 2017 IEEE Visualization Conference and publised at Computer Graphics & Applications:

ARIES: Enabling Visual Exploration and Organization of Art Image Collections.
Lhaylla Crissaff, Louisa Ruby, Samantha Deutch, Luke DuBois, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Juliana Freire and Cláudio T. Silva.
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 38 (1), 2018, 91-108.

Team

Lhaylla Crissaff is a professor in the Department of Geometry at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil. Her research interests cover most aspects of visual computing, especially scientific and information visualization. During 2015, she was postdoctoral researcher at New York University, when she helped develop ARIES - ARt Image Exploration Space in collaboration with The Frick Collection. Crissaff received her PhD in applied mathematics from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2009. Contact at lhayllacrissaff@id.uff.br.

João Rulff is a research associate at NYU Tandon School of Engineering since 2017, under the supervision of Professor Claudio Silva. He worked as a research assistant at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil, where he received his B.Sc. in Computer Science. In conjunction with his B.Sc he had completed internships at IBM, SLAC-Stanford and STI-UFF. Rulff also spent one year as a visitor student at Monmouth University. Contact at jlrulff@nyu.edu.

Marcos Lage is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil, where he is one of the principal investigators of the Prograf Laboratory. His research interests include most aspects of visual computing, especially scientific and information visualization, numerical simulations, geometry processing, and topological data structures. Lage has a PhD in applied mathematics from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. Contact him at mlage@ic.uff.br.

Louisa Wood Ruby is Head of Research at The Frick Art Reference Library and runs both the Scholars' Program and the Digital Art History Lab [DAHL]. The Scholars' Program aims to promote collaboration and facilitate the exchange of ideas and dissemination of new work among researchers while the DAHL seeks to increase awareness of methodological and scholarly trends in digital humanities and art history. Ruby received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and is a member of the College Art Association, The Renaissance Society of America, The Sixteenth Century Society, CODART [Curators of Dutch and Flemish Art], and currently serves as Vice-President of the Historians of Netherlandish Art.

Samantha Deutch is an Assistant Director of the Center for the History of Collecting at The Frick Collection, Frick Art Reference Library. Deutch is the author of the Center's award winning Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America [https://tinyurl.com/jnpybft], and has been working collaboratively on developing tools for image and data analysis, access, and preservation. She has served as Secretary on the board of the New York chapter of the Art Libraries Society of North America [2010–2012], is currently serving as Secretary for national society, and chaired the steering committee of the New York Digital Art History Group.

Juliana Freire is a professor of computer science and engineering and data science at New York University. She holds an appointment at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Science, is a faculty member at the NYU Center for Urban Science and at the NYU Center of Data Science. Her recent research has focused on big-data analysis and visualization, large-scale information integration, web crawling and domain discovery, provenance management, and computational reproducibility. Freire is an active member of the database and web research communities, with over 170 technical papers, several open-source systems, and 12 US patents. She is an ACM Fellow and a recipient of an NSF CAREER, two IBM Faculty awards, and a Google Faculty Research award. She has chaired or co-chaired workshops and conferences, and participated as a program committee member in over 70 events. Her research grants are from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Sloan Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, W.M. Keck Foundation, Google, Amazon, AT&T, the University of Utah, New York University, Microsoft Research, Yahoo! and IBM. Contact at juliana.freire@nyu.edu.

Cláudio T. Silva is a professor of computer science and engineering and data science at New York University. His research includes the intersection of visualization, data analysis, and geometric computing, as well as the analysis of urban and sports data. In 2013, he was selected as an IEEE Fellow and in 2014 he won the IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award. He helped develop MLB.com’s Statcast player tracking system, which won the Alpha Award for Best Analytics Innovation/Technology at the 2015 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. In 2015, he was elected chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Contact at csilva@nyu.edu.

Press

• Medium
• Forbes
• XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students
• Iconograph in Art History Blog

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