Evolving a library of artistic scene descriptors

• Authors: Simon Colton
• Venue: EvoMUSART'12 Proceedings of the First international conference on Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design
• Year: 2012

We describe the building of a library of 10,000 distinct abstract art images, and how these can be interpreted as describing the placement of objects in a scene for generative painting projects. Building the library to contain only markedly distinct images necessitated a machine learning approach, whereby two decision trees were derived to predict visual similarity in pairs of images. The first tree uses genotypical information to predict before image generation whether two images will be too similar. The second tree uses phenotypical information, namely how pairs of images differ when segmented using various distance thresholds. Taken together, the trees are highly effective at quickly predicting when two images are similar, and we used this in an evolutionary search where non-unique individuals are pruned, to build up the library. We show how the pruning approach can be used alongside a fitness function to increase the yield of images with certain properties, such as low/high colour variety, symmetry and contrast.