Many museums across the world are usingAI to identify fake paintingsor to measurethe quality of the art on exhibition.
Speaking at the TNW Conference,Robert G. Erdmann — Senior Scientist and Full Professor at the Rijksmuseum and University of Amsterdam — gaveexamples of how the museum is using AI to unlock new artistic mysteries.
To create a five-minute video of Lidded ewer, an art piece made by Adam van Vianen, the museum photographer took 1,000 images of the object. However, if you want to play a five-minute high-resolution clip, those images couldn’t make for enough frames. So the museum used AI to superficially insert images and drum up the resolution.
In another project, researchers used AI to separate patterns of ink created on old papers, to identify watermarks on them.They then used those unveiled watermarks to locate the origins of the papermaker.
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Rijksmuseum is no stranger to making its art available for AI research. Last July,MIT‘sComputer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Microsoft teamedup to explore links between historical painting, including some from the Amsterdam-based museum.
Around the same time, it also kicked offOperation Night Watch, which used AI to restore Rembrandt’s 1642 masterworkThe Night Watch. Erdmann mentioned that the museum will soon releaseawhopping717-gigapixel imageof the work — made from different images that are 5.6 terabytes in combined size.
The advantage of using this many images is to train neural networks that can identify the style of the painting, and restore blemishes inRembrandt‘s work.
You can read more about Operation Night Watchhere.
Story byIvan Mehta
Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.“Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.”
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