Retrieval of paintings using effects induced by color features

Image databases are now a subject of increasing attention in multimedia, for archiving and retrieval of images in the fields of art, history, medicine and industry, among others. From the psychological point of view, color perception is related to several factors including color features (brightness, chromaticity and saturation), surrounding colors, color spatial organization, observer memory/knowledge/experience etc. Paintings are an example where the message is contained more in the high-level color qualities and spatial arrangements than in the physical properties of colors. Starting from this observation, Johannes Itten (1961) introduced a formalism to analyze the use of color in art and the effects that this induces on the user's psyche. We present a system which translates the Itten theory into a formal language that allows to express the semantics associated with the combination of chromatic properties of color images. Fuzzy sets are used to represent low-level region properties. A formal language and a set of model checking rules are implemented that allow to define semantic clauses and verify the degree of truth by which they hold over an image.