Digital Cultural Heritage Imaging via Osmosis Filtering

Abstract. InCulturalHeritage(CH)imaging,dataacquiredwithindif- ferent 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 distin- guishing the physical properties of the object under restoration. Further- more, 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 tech- niques based on reflectance, emission and fluorescence mode in the opti- cal 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.