Multimodal style aggregation network for art image classification

A large number of paintings are digitized, the automatic recognition and retrieval of artistic image styles become very meaningful. Because there is no standard definition and quantitative description of characteristics of artistic style, the representation of style is still a difficult problem. Recently, some work have used deep correlation features in neural style transfer to describe the texture characteristics of paintings and have achieved exciting results. Inspired by this, this paper proposes a multimodal style aggregation network that incorporates three modalities of texture, structure and color information of artistic images. Specifically, the group-wise Gram aggregation model is proposed to capture multi-level texture styles. The global average pooling (GAP) and histogram operation are employed to perform distillation of the high-level structural style and the low-level color style, respectively. Moreover, an improved deep correlation feature calculation method called learnable Gram (L-Gram) is proposed to enhance the ability to express style. Experiments show that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in five style datasets.