Digital painting analysis, at the cross section of engineering, mathematics and culture

Bruno Cornelis, Ann Dooms, Jan Cornelis, Frederik Leen, Peter Schelkens

Abstract: Museums started digitizing their collections, mainly for preservation, documentation and dissemination purposes, but one can go further than archival: digital acquisition enables digital analysis of art and in particular paintings. This proves to be a useful, non invasive tool, for many applications such as restoration, conservation, art history, material and structure characterization, authentication, dating and even style analysis. Paintings are complex structures. Analysis of the support and all pictorial layers requires multimodal imaging, high resolution and standardized data acquisition. We situate our own research on canvas characterization, craquelure detection, multispectral data analysis, object extraction and image enhancement within the state of the art.