  Since the landmarks established by the Cremonese school in the 16th century,
the history of violin design has been marked by experimentation. While great
effort has been invested since the early 19th century by the scientific
community on researching violin acoustics, substantially less attention has
been given to the statistical characterization of how the violin shape evolved
over time. In this paper we study the morphology of violins retrieved from the
Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO) database -- the largest freely
accessible platform providing information about instruments held in public
museums. From the violin images, we derive a set of measurements that reflect
relevant geometrical features of the instruments. The application of Principal
Component Analysis (PCA) uncovered similarities between violin makers and their
respective copyists, as well as among luthiers belonging to the same family
lineage, in the context of historical narrative. Combined with a time-windowed
approach, thin plate splines visualizations revealed that the average violin
outline has remained mostly stable over time, not adhering to any particular
trends of design across different periods in music history.

Applications;Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition