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Art’s hidden topology: A window into human perception

Fig 12

Examples of topological properties of art [11] (a) and pseudo-art images (b).

Left column: greyscale-converted original image; middle section: topological results for filtration from black to white; right section: topological results filtration from white to black; within each section – left column: topological characteristic in dimension 0 and right column: topological characteristics in dimension 1. The topological characteristics, the same for both dimensions, are: persistence landscapes(top) and barcodes (bottom). The horizontal axis for both characteristics is pixel intensity filtration steps (in the range ). Vertical axes are: for persistence landscapes – arbitrary units; for barcodes – index of a barcode in the birth sorted list of all barcodes for an image. Every landscape (for every dimension) is constructed from a different number of layers – the layers are coloured according to the legend above each landscape. The barcodes for the pseudo-artistic images are significantly shorter than for the artistic images, which shows a smaller persistence of the former. As can be read from the landscape diagrams, the pseudo-artistic images contained significantly fewer holes and cycles indicting the far richer structure of the artistic image.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014156.g012