A Pipeline for the Digitization and the Realistic Rendering of Paintings

Abstract

Digitization and visualization are both of great importance for Cultural Heritage, for instance for the design of virtual galleries. Despite a lot of research, enabling a real-time walkthrough around complex digital copies still remains difficult and challenging in the general case due to the complexity of the measurement and to the amount of data that has to be dealt with. In this paper, we introduce a new dedicated pipeline for both digitization and realistic rendering of art paintings. We exploit the fact that geometrical variations over the canvas are generally small, yet not negligible from a visual point of view. Unlike most existing painting digitization systems, we thus propose to acquire both geometry and texture. Then, we render both as a whole by using, for the texture, an analytical model which is fitted from real measurements, and by using for the geometry a hybrid approach combining two relief rendering techniques according to the scale. This allows us to derive an efficient adaptive scheme guaranteeing fast rendering rates for all viewpoints. With our pipeline the painting s relief is well preserved, thus the rendering is of high quality, and in addition the final data representing the digital copies remain compact.