Application of image quality metamerism to investigate gold color area in cultural property

Abstract

A concept of image quality metamerism as an expansion of conventional metamerism defined in color science is introduced, and it is applied to segment similar color areas in a cultural property. The image quality metamerism can unify different image quality attributes based on an index showing the degree of image quality metamerism proposed. As a basic research step, the index is consisted of color and texture information and examined to investigate a cultural property. The property investigated is a pair of folding screen paintings that depict the thriving city of Kyoto designated as a nationally important cultural property in Japan. Gold-colored areas painted by using high granularity colorants compared with other color areas are evaluated based on the image quality metamerism index locally, then the index is visualized as a map showing the possibility of the image quality metamer to the reference pixel set in the same image. This visualization means a segmentation of areas where color is similar but texture is different. The experimental result showed that the proposed method was effective to show areas of gold color areas in the property.