Abstract
Abstract New approaches in the application of multispectral imaging to the recovery of archeological wall paintings are presented, based on statistical techniques and on a novel method of image treatment (Chromatic Derivative Imaging – ChromaDI) which offers a way of embedding information coming from four spectral bands into a standard RGB image. The methods are applied to some wall paintings from the Tomb of the Monkey, an Etruscan tomb in the necropolis of Poggio Renzo, near the city of Chiusi (Siena), Italy, dated around 480-470 BC. It is shown that the techniques described are able to highlight and enhance a number of details that cannot be perceived in either any of the original channel images or any single processed output channel.
Highlights
Multispectral Infrared imaging is a simple non-invasive technique that has been widely applied in Cultural Heritage analysis and study [1,2,3,4,5]
Four images of the subject under study are acquired in the spectral bands of Blue, Green, Red and Infrared; in most cases, the Infrared image carries the most relevant information, because infrared radiation penetrates under the surface, allowing for the visualization of otherwise invisible details such as underdrawings and ‘pentimenti’ in canvas and panel paintings [6,7]
In some cases, useful information can be derived by the analysis of the whole multispectral series; in a recent paper [9] we presented a new approach based on blind signal processing [10,11,12] for extracting hidden information from a painting
Summary
Multispectral Infrared imaging is a simple non-invasive technique that has been widely applied in Cultural Heritage analysis and study [1,2,3,4,5]. The most usual combination is Infrared, Red and Green (IrRG), the combination Infrared, Green and Blue (IrGB) [13] can be used This procedure implies that one channel is discarded, so the information it carries is lost in the final image. We show that a simple method, exploiting the reflectivity curve of the subject would guarantee the simplicity of the approach just described while maintaining the information from all the multispectral set. The output of the method, called Chromatic Derivative (ChromaD) image, is a false color image related to the first derivative of the reflectivity curve of the subject. The resulting false color images can be obtained very through standard image processing software, even in the presence of very large multispectral image sets
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