Lawrence A. Taplin

An investigation of multispectral imaging for the mapping of pigments in paintings

Compared with colorimetric imaging, multispectral imaging has the advantage of retrieving spectral reflectance factor of each pixel of a painting. Using this spectral information, pigment mapping is concerned with decomposing the spectrum into its constituent pigments and their relative contributions. The output of pigment mapping is a series of spatial concentration maps of the pigments comprising the painting. This approach was used to study Vincent van Goghs The Starry Night. The artists palette was approximated using ten oil pigments, selected from a large database of pigments used in oil paintings and a priori analytical research on one of his self portraits, executed during the same time period. The pigment mapping was based on single-constant Kubelka-Munk theory. It was found that the region of blue sky where the stars were located contained, predominantly, ultramarine blue while the swirling sky and region surrounding the moon contained, predominantly, cobalt blue. Emerald green, used in light bluish-green brushstrokes surrounding the moon, was not used to create the dark green in the cypresses. A measurement of lead white from Georges Seurats La Grande Jatte was used as the white when mapping The Starry Night. The absorption and scattering properties of this white were replaced with a modern dispersion of lead white in linseed oil and used to simulate the paintings appearance before the natural darkening and yellowing of lead white oil paint. Pigment mapping based on spectral imaging was found to be a viable and practical approach for analyzing pigment composition, providing new insight into an artists working method, the possibility for aiding in restorative inpainting, and lighting design.

A Comparison of Small-Aperture and Image-Based Spectrophotometry of Paintings

Abstract An experiment was performed that compared conventional small-aperture and image-based reflection spectrophotometry of paintings. The imaging system used a liquid-crystal tunable filter, resulting in 31 spectral bands evenly sampled between 400 and 700 nm and ranging in bandwidth between 10 and 60 nm. The small-aperture spectrophotometer had a constant bandwidth of 10 nm. Test targets consisting of chromatic and neutral samples of various colors and spectral properties were used to derive a calibration transformation between the two technologies. Three paintings were analyzed: Saint Jerome Reading by Alvise Vivarini, Murnau by Alexej von Jawlensky and Pot of Geraniums by Henri Matisse, all from the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Average colorimetric accuracy varied between 2.0 and 3.2 ΔE00 units and the average spectral accuracy varied between 1.0 and 2.1% spectral root-mean-square. Two drawbacks are that the imaging system has a high uncertainty at short wavelengths, and the spectral matches for samples with flat spectra are slightly worse than for other samples. Both limitations can be corrected by changes in lighting, the calibration target, and the method of deriving the transformation matrix. Nevertheless, the imaging system has the advantage of no moving parts and may not require image registration, making it well suited to perform scientific imaging of cultural heritage. Furthermore, the image-based spectra have sufficient accuracy for pigment identification and mapping.