Digital image processing of the Ghent altarpiece : supporting the painting's study and conservation treatment

In this article, we show progress in certain image processing techniques that can support the physical restoration of the painting, its art-historical analysis, or both. We show how analysis of the crack patterns could indicate possible areas of overpaint, which may be of great value for the physical restoration campaign, after further validation. Next, we explore how digital image inpainting can serve as a simulation for the restoration of paint losses. Finally, we explore how the statistical analysis of the relatively simple and frequently recurring objects (such as pearls in this masterpiece) may characterize the consistency of the painter’s style and thereby aid both art-historical interpretation and physical restoration campaign

Digital restoration of colour cinematic films using imaging spectroscopy and machine learning

Digital restoration is a rapidly growing methodology within the field of heritage conservation, especially for early cinematic films which have intrinsically unstable dye colourants that suffer from irreversible colour fading. Although numerous techniques to restore film digitally have emerged recently, complex degradation remains a challenging problem. This paper proposes a novel vector quantization (VQ) algorithm for restoring movie frames based on the acquisition of spectroscopic data with a custom-made push-broom VNIR hyperspectral camera (380–780 nm). The VQ algorithm utilizes what we call a multi-codebook that correlates degraded areas with corresponding non-degraded ones selected from reference frames. The spectral-codebook was compared with a professional commercially available film restoration software (DaVinci Resolve 17) tested both on RGB and on hyperspectral providing better results in terms of colour reconstruction

THE ROLE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE LEARNING IN PRESERVING CULTURAL HERITAGE AND ART WORKS VIA VIRTUAL RESTORATION

Artifacts including paintings, drawings, prints, mosaics, sculptures, historical structures and monuments, as well as archaeological sites present a key part of our cultural heritage. It consists of Intangible culture (such as folklore, traditions, language, and knowledge), tangible culture (such as buildings, monuments, landscapes, archival materials, books, works of art, and artifacts), and natural heritage (such as biodiversity and culturally significant landscapes) .Now we will concentrate on tangible culture and its problems and how to handle them. One of its biggest problems is that over the years the nature of the materials used in the creation of the artwork make them prone to cracks, fractures, stains, and colors fading and blurring. The causes of their damage could be of natural or human- related reasons. The natural causes range from war, fires, earthquakes, natural disasters and the human-related causes range from accidental events like to pollution which results of climate changes, which like acid rain. It is a must to consider the environment in which you store your artwork. Our regular environment's light, heat, moisture, and pollution levels can lead to harmful chemical and physical reactions in artwork. There are several reasons why it is necessary to preserve ancient works of art. The fact that it enables us to comprehend the historical and cultural context of the era in which it was made is one of the key factors. Then preserving our artworks is a must and this can be done by manual techniques or using machine learning algorithms

Relate that image: A tool for finding related cultural heritage images

Museums,galleries, art centers, etc. are increasingly seeing the benefits of digitalizing their art work collections –and acting on it. The more visible benefits usually have to do with advertising, involving the citizens, or creating interactive tools that get people interested in coming to museums or buying art. With the availability of these increasingly large collections, analysis of art images has gained attention from researchers.This master thesis proposes a tool to recommend paintingsthat are similar to a given image of an artwork. We define different similarity measures that include criteria existent in the metadata associated with the digitized pictures (e.g. style, genre, artist, etc.), but also image content similarity. The work is more closely related to existing approaches on automatic classification of paintings, but also shares techniques with other areas such as image clustering. Our goal is to offer a tool that can enable creative uses, support the work of gallery / museum curators, help create interesting and interactive educational content, or create clusters of images as training sets for further learning and analysis algorithms

VR Technologies in Cultural Heritage

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on VR Technologies in Cultural Heritage, VRTCH 2018, held in Brasov, Romania in May 2018. The 13 revised full papers along with the 5 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The papers of this volume are organized in topical sections on data acquisition and modelling, visualization methods / audio, sensors and actuators, data management, restoration and digitization, cultural tourism

VR Technologies in Cultural Heritage

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on VR Technologies in Cultural Heritage, VRTCH 2018, held in Brasov, Romania in May 2018. The 13 revised full papers along with the 5 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The papers of this volume are organized in topical sections on data acquisition and modelling, visualization methods / audio, sensors and actuators, data management, restoration and digitization, cultural tourism