AI & ART - What if … Van Eyck painted my selfie?

3 nov

Maybe you've already wondered, but what would your selfie look like if Van Eyck, the most famous Flemish Primitive, painted it? It sounds like a crazy idea, but it's not that far-fetched!

Setup of this educational project

Jan Van Eyck was a talented painter. He knew better than anyone how to bring texture to his works. The tapestry and chainmail of Saint George, in the work 'Madonna and Canon van der Paele', seem exactly real. He had an unparalleled eye for detail.

You can also admire this in another work, the 'Arnolfini Portrait'. So much detail that you can also find a kind of self-portrait of Van Eyck in the mirror behind the couple! A selfie, as it were, hidden in the work for someone else.

Here's the origin of this AI-in-class educational project: can we use an AI to create a Van Eyck version of our selfie?

From Flemish Primitive to high-tech AI!

We've known for some time that Van Eyck can do something. His works are known and praised worldwide. But what if an A.I. could not only recognize the work of Van Eyck and his typical style, but also copy it and apply it to another photo?

The smartphone app Prisma has been fully along with this idea for several years now! Prisma launched in 2016 as an iOS app for the iPhone. The app was developed by Russian developers. The app allows the user to load a photo and edit it with 'filters'. These filters were based on well-known artists.

In fact, no filter was placed over the photo or image, but the photo on Prisma's servers was parsed, adapted and rebuilt particle by particle according to the selected style! Still a lot more impressive than 'filter' suggested! But how does this work?

The technique of dissecting a photo, adjusting it part by part, applying a style ... is what we call DeepArt. This technique works on the basis of Deep Learning technology. More information can be found in the video at the top of this page!

But we (or the AI, actually…) are using two images: