Katherine Kornei, The New York Times; A 16th-Century Sketch Claims to Depict Anne Boleyn. A.I. Says It’s Her Mom.
Using facial-recognition technology, scholars have concluded that a 500-year-old drawing labeled “Anna Bollein Queen” more likely showed her mother, Elizabeth Howard.
"To dig into this mystery, Ms. Davies and her colleagues, including David G. Stork, a computer scientist and electrical engineer at Stanford University, turned to computational facial recognition. “This has one foot in art history and one foot in computer science,” Dr. Stork said...
Amit Roy-Chowdhury, a computer vision scientist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the research, said that facial recognition can play an important role in art history. But going forward, he added, it will be important to assemble larger training data sets of faces in artwork, as algorithms trained strictly on photographs can introduce uncertainties. And that could be a challenge, since there are millions of faces in photographs but far fewer in art. “For artwork, you don’t have that many examples,” Dr. Roy-Chowdhury said."
