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Projects

Bringing art and science together to inspire innovation

Projects

Combining expertise and infrastructure, the Center unites academic researchers and students from Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering, Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences, and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, with conservators, curators, and conservation scientists from the Art Institute of Chicago. Together we conduct scholarly inquiry and advance conservation practices.

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Projects Gallery

Materials and techniques used by Baroque artists – the scientific investigation of Danaë by Orazio Gentileschi

Materials and techniques used by Baroque artists – the scientific investigation of Danaë by Orazio Gentileschi

Were two version of the same painting created using similar materials?

Materials and techniques used by Baroque artists – the scientific investigation of Danaë by Orazio Gentileschi

Pentimenti or no pentimenti? In depth scientific investigation of the pigments used in the second version of Orazio Gentileschi’s Danaë to understand variations in the Italian master’s painting technique.

Understanding James Tissot’s painting materials and techniques

Understanding James Tissot’s painting materials and techniques

Examine and analyze a large corpus of Tissot’s paintings using state-of-the-art scientific analysis at both the macro- and micro- scale to rediscover James Tissot’s paint technique.

Understanding James Tissot’s painting materials and techniques

A collaborative multidisciplinary approach on how materials and techniques used by James Tissot fit between his academic training and the more avant-garde movements of his time.

Investigating an Ancient Mummy with Augmented Reality

Investigating an Ancient Mummy with Augmented Reality

A ground-breaking interactive augmented reality (AR) visualization was created for the exhibition "Paint the Eyes Softer at the Block Museum"

Investigating an Ancient Mummy with Augmented Reality

To our knowledge, the Block Museum was the first museum in the country to make use of this new open source tool. The result is a mobile application that can be downloaded to an Apple smartphone or tablet. Viewers are able to use the device to “scan” the mummy in real time and in motion, walking around the mummy display case to see on their devices various internal details revealed by the CT scan.

Near Light Correction for Image Relighting and 3D Shape Recovery

Near Light Correction for Image Relighting and 3D Shape Recovery

Learn more about our near-light illumination model for image relighting and 3D shape recovery.

Near Light Correction for Image Relighting and 3D Shape Recovery

We correct the near-light distance effect to provide much more uniformly lit images that yield more appealing image for relighting applications. Furthermore, we use our near-light model for more accurate photometric stereo calculations of surface normals, eliminating the “potato-chip” shaped surface reconstruction error that results from violating the far-light assumption.

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