Steps towards the Ultimate Reproduction: 3D Imaging of Paintings

Paintings are versatile near-planar objects with material characteristics that vary widely. The fact that paint has a material presence is often overlooked, mostly because of the fact that we encounter many of these artworks through two dimensional reproductions. The capture of paintings in the third dimension is not only interesting for study, restoration and conservation, but it also facilitates making three dimensional reproductions through novel 3-D printing methods. No single imaging method is ideally suited to capture the painting's color and topography and each have specific drawbacks. We have therefore designed an efficient imaging system dedicated to capturing paintings in both color and topography with a high resolution. The derived data can be used to print the painting in full color 3-D, which allows us to appreciate the material aspect of the painting in a reproduction. The difference in appearance between the original with such an ultimate reproduction gives us insights in parts of the painting we do not yet understand and are not yet able to reproduce. Moving towards an ultimate reproduction will therefore provide us the knowledge to thoroughly understand why and how a painting looks the way it does today.

CV

Tim Zaman (1988) received his BSc degree in mechanical engineering and a MSc degree in biorobotics from the Delft University of Technology, where he specialized in computer vision. For his thesis he developed a high resolution full color 3D scanner specifically for paintings. He is currently a PhD student at the Delft University of Technology, developing novel imaging systems for cultural heritage.