Artificial intelligence is joining a long-running debate about art in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. Bored out of the cliffs above the Dachuan river, along the ancient Silk Road in northern China, this collection of 735 caves has outlived the various dynasties that built and filled them with over a millennium of Buddhist art.
Amongst the artworks are thousands of murals that have been dated according to their creation, but with some of them art historians can鈥檛 agree. To try to settle the debate, researchers at Wuhan University have developed an AI to categorise the murals by dynastic era.
Qin Zou and his team trained and tested their AI on nearly 4000 labelled images from six different periods. They taught it to extract features, such as colour and the curve of the paint stroke. It was also taught to look for 鈥渉idden visual codes鈥�, such as the layout of a religious scene or the scale of intruments.
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The system had an accuracy of around 72 per cent for categorising paintings across eras, but when asked to choose between only two periods, the accuracy was 91 per cent.
听The AI was then used on seven controversial paintings with question marks over their creation dates. Four confirmed the current expert consensus. Two others had divided opinions between two distinguished experts as to whether they originated from the Late or Early Tang era. All six of the AI decisions were approved by the Dunhuang Research Academia, the institute charged with overseeing the caves.
The final mural, known as the Peacock King, was thought to be from the era of the Five Dynasties. But the AI disagreed, putting it as a Late Tang creation and creating a little controversy of its own.
at East Michigan University thinks the results are interesting, but that another dating method looking at subject matter such as costume has been overlooked. 鈥淭his is pertinent in the case of the Peacock King, as likely the association of the image with the Five Dynasties was based to some measure on the subject matter听,鈥� he says.
The team plans to apply AI to other controversial murals, before eventually analysing all of the caves.
Reference: arXiv,
