Stacking-based ensemble learning for identifying artist signatures on paintings

Abstract

Identifying artist signatures on paintings is essential for authenticating artworks and advancing digital humanities. An artist’s signature is a consistent element included in each painting that the artist creates, providing a unique identifier for their work. Traditional methods that rely on expert analysis and manual comparison are time-consuming and are prone to human error. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promise in automating this process, existing single-model approaches struggle with the diversity and complexity of artistic styles, leading to limitations in their performance and generalizability. Therefore, this study proposes an ensemble learning approach that integrates the predictive power of multiple CNN-based models. The proposed framework leverages the strengths of three state-of-the-art CNNs: EfficientNetB4, ResNet-50, and Xception. These models were independently trained, and the predictions were combined using a meta-learning strategy. To address class imbalance, data augmentation techniques and weighted loss functions were employed. The experimental results obtained on a dataset of more than 8,000 paintings from 50 artists demonstrate significant improvements over individual CNN architectures and other ensemble methods, thereby effectively capturing complex features and improving generalizability.