Digital cultural heritage imaging via osmosis filtering

In Cultural Heritage (CH) imaging, data acquired within different spectral regions are often used to inspect surface and sub-surface features. Due to the experimental setup, these images may suffer from intensity inhomogeneities, which may prevent conservators from distinguishing the physical properties of the object under restoration. Furthermore, in multi-modal imaging, the transfer of information between one modality to another is often used to integrate image contents. In this paper, we apply the image osmosis model proposed in [4, 10, 12] to solve correct these problems arising when diagnostic CH imaging techniques based on reflectance, emission and fluorescence mode in the optical and thermal range are used. For an efficient computation, we use stable operator splitting techniques to solve the discretised model. We test our methods on real artwork datasets: the thermal measurements of the mural painting “Monocromo” by Leonardo Da Vinci, the UV-VIS-IR imaging of an ancient Russian icon and the Archimedes Palimpsest dataset.