Photographing paintings by image fusion

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

18 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of obtaining a quality photograph of a painting by multi-image fusion methods. The problem is particularly challenging because of the uncontrolled illumination conditions and of the destructive reflection speckle present in most photographs of paintings. A fully automatic image processing chain is described that, starting from several bursts of a painting taken under different angles, permits one to obtain the best possible result by eliminating highlights and motion blur by robust statistics, reducing noise by fusion, and compensating optical distortion in the registration process. This image fusion method is applicable to photographs of a painting taken with a hand-held camera without any particular setup. It works under bad lighting conditions and eliminates motion blur, even when the painting is protected by a glass screen creating structured reflections of the room. The careful discussion of each step of the processing chain also permits one to review and discuss the efficiency of the image fusion tools recently proposed in the literature and insert several new ones in the chain. © 2012 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1055-1087
Number of pages33
JournalSIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences
Volume5
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2012
Externally publishedYes

Funding

This research was partially funded by the Office of Naval research under grant N00014-97-1-0839, the European Research Council, advanced grant “Twelve labours,” the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, under the Ramón y Cajal program, the MTM2009-08171, TIN2008-04752/TIN, and CDTI CENIT-2007-1012 I3MEDIA projects, and the Generalitat de Catalunya under the GRC 2009 SGR 773 project.

Keywords

  • Denoising
  • Multi-image processing
  • Registration
  • Restoration

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