April 14, 2009

New technique provides illusion of restoration without risk of damage to priceless artifacts

A Purdue University team of researchers has created a "virtual restoration" process that visually restores deteriorated objects while leaving them physically unchanged.

The team will give demonstrations of the process at the Eiteljorg Museum of Native American Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art this week during the Museum and the Web 2009 annual conference.

Daniel Aliaga, a Purdue assistant professor of computer science, and graduate students Alvin Law and Yu Hong Yeung developed the technique, which uses light projections to give the illusion of restoration.

"Restoration efforts are faced with the challenge of keeping the object as unaltered as possible while still providing a view of the object as it was initially intended to be seen," Aliaga said. "Using off-the-shelf hardware we have developed a fundamentally different way to visually explore and compare multiple restorations on objects without any physical alteration."

The technique also allows for an interactive display that would let visitors view several possible restored states for the object.

"Historical artifacts might actually have multiple possible restorations, either because of uncertainty in its original appearance or because the artifact appeared differently depending on the time period," he said. "We are able to get past these limitations by altering the visual appearance of the objects in a very flexible manner."

The technique first captures an image of the object using a standard digital camera. The image is then fed into a computer program that calculates the position, color and intensity of light needed to achieve the desired effect. Several digital projectors project the illusion onto the object, Aliaga said.

Writer: Elizabeth Gardner, (765) 494-2081, ekgardner@purdue.edu

Source: Daniel Aliaga, (765) 496-7943, aliaga@cs.purdue.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

Note to Journalists: The Purdue research team is working with the Eiteljorg Museum of Native American Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art to provide demonstrations of the "virtual restoration" during the Museum and the Web annual conference. Demonstrations will be held on Tuesday (April 14) at the Eiteljorg Museum, on Thursday (April 16) at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and on Saturday (April 18) at the Hyatt Hotel conference headquarters. Details of the Eiteljorg museum photo opportunity are available at https://www.eiteljorg.org/ejm_News/details.asp?id=2043

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