Revealing pentimenti: the hidden history in a painting
Amy Ashurst Gooch · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2007
Art conservators often explore X-ray images of paintings to help find pentimenti, the artist's revisions hidden beneath the painting's visible first surfaces. X-ray interpretation is difficult due to artifacts in the image, superimposed features from all paint layers, and because image intensity depends on both the paint layer thickness and each pigment's opacity. We present a robust user-guided method to suppress clutter, find visually significant differences between X-ray images and color photographs, and visualize them together. These tools allow domain experts as well as museum visitors to explore the artist's creative decisions that led to a masterpiece.