Art restoration is good in theory and practice, but it is often painstakingly slow and inefficient. But fear not, art lovers! An MIT graduate student named Alex Kachkine has developed a new process that uses 3D printing and AI to restore paintings in hours, not months or years.
His technique involves creating transparent, color-matched "masks" that are applied directly onto damaged areas. It’s a process that leaves the original work untouched, thus it is fully reversible and modifiable. As detailed in his paper in Nature, it's a process with immense promise: it leaves a permanent digital record and boasts incredible efficiency (a 15th-century painting with thousands of pockmarks and surface damages, for example, was restored in just 3.5 hours).
More after the bump.
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