English

Integrating Visual and X-Ray Machine Learning Features in the Study of Paintings by Goya

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-11-04 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Art authentication of Francisco Goya's works presents complex computational challenges due to his heterogeneous stylistic evolution and extensive historical patterns of forgery. We introduce a novel multimodal machine learning framework that applies identical feature extraction techniques to both visual and X-ray radiographic images of Goya paintings. The unified feature extraction pipeline incorporates Grey-Level Co-occurrence Matrix descriptors, Local Binary Patterns, entropy measures, energy calculations, and colour distribution analysis applied consistently across both imaging modalities. The extracted features from both visual and X-ray images are processed through an optimised One-Class Support Vector Machine with hyperparameter tuning. Using a dataset of 24 authenticated Goya paintings with corresponding X-ray images, split into an 80/20 train-test configuration with 10-fold cross-validation, the framework achieves 97.8% classification accuracy with a 0.022 false positive rate. Case study analysis of ``Un Gigante'' demonstrates the practical efficacy of our pipeline, achieving 92.3% authentication confidence through unified multimodal feature analysis. Our results indicate substantial performance improvement over single-modal approaches, establishing the effectiveness of applying identical computational methods to both visual and radiographic imagery in art authentication applications.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.01000,
  title  = {Integrating Visual and X-Ray Machine Learning Features in the Study of Paintings by Goya},
  author = {Hassan Ugail and Ismail Lujain Jaleel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.01000},
  year   = {2025}
}