Poses of People in Art: A Data Set for Human Pose Estimation in Digital Art History
This provides a resource for researchers in digital art history and computer vision to study human poses in art, though it is incremental as it addresses a data gap rather than a methodological breakthrough.
The authors tackled the lack of domain-specific data for human pose estimation in digital art history by introducing the Poses of People in Art data set, which includes 2,454 images with 10,749 human figures annotated with bounding boxes and up to 17 keypoints, enabling automated analysis of body phenomena in art.
Throughout the history of art, the pose, as the holistic abstraction of the human body's expression, has proven to be a constant in numerous studies. However, due to the enormous amount of data that so far had to be processed by hand, its crucial role to the formulaic recapitulation of art-historical motifs since antiquity could only be highlighted selectively. This is true even for the now automated estimation of human poses, as domain-specific, sufficiently large data sets required for training computational models are either not publicly available or not indexed at a fine enough granularity. With the Poses of People in Art data set, we introduce the first openly licensed data set for estimating human poses in art and validating human pose estimators. It consists of 2,454 images from 22 art-historical depiction styles, including those that have increasingly turned away from lifelike representations of the body since the 19th century. A total of 10,749 human figures are precisely enclosed by rectangular bounding boxes, with a maximum of four per image labeled by up to 17 keypoints; among these are mainly joints such as elbows and knees. For machine learning purposes, the data set is divided into three subsets, training, validation, and testing, that follow the established JSON-based Microsoft COCO format, respectively. Each image annotation, in addition to mandatory fields, provides metadata from the art-historical online encyclopedia WikiArt. With this paper, we elaborate on the acquisition and constitution of the data set, address various application scenarios, and discuss prospects for a digitally supported art history. We show that the data set enables the investigation of body phenomena in art, whether at the level of individual figures, which can be captured in their subtleties, or entire figure constellations, whose position, distance, or proximity to one another is considered.