Estimation of surface properties for art paintings using a sixband scanner

Abstract

The imaging systems using cameras to archive art paintings have several essential problems including image resolution and lens distortion. A scanner is considered as a precise imaging device, which can acquire images with high resolution and without camera lens distortion. The present paper proposes a method to estimate the surface properties of art paintings for digital archiving using the six-band scanner as a multiband spectral imaging system. The surface properties include surface-spectral reflectance and surface shape. The performance of the proposed method is compared with the previous studies that used the multiband imaging method by digital cameras. The current method has not only found to be as precise as the multiband imaging method in estimation accuracy, but also accompanied with several additional advantages.