Ecran de l'application Ikonikat

A screen from the Ikonikat (Ikonik Analysis Toolkit) application. Here, the user interface by means of which museum visitors can mark with their fingers the significant areas of Jacques-Louis David’s painting (Belisarius Begging for Alms, 1780, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille). This application developed by research scientists at CNRS is a tool for visual analysis of works of art aimed at both the public and experts. Both a research and a cultural outreach tool, it assists in better understanding the reception of art images. Equipped with a tablet, the visitor looking at a painting can indicate, without resorting to words, what he thinks is pertinent in the image. Ikonikat is part of the VISUALL-tek project, a library of tools enabling collective interrogation of images. These applications are the result of interdisciplinary discussions between social science researchers and computer scientists specialising in man-machine interaction at the Computer Science, Signal and Automatic Control research centre in Lille (CNRS/University Lille 1/École Centrale de Lille).