Articles by Denis Pitzalis

Many pioneering imaging techniques have been used at the C2RMF in order to acquire artworks in digital form. These techniques are considered non-destructive and non-invasive analyses and they offer extensive and detailed information about works of art and include multispectral imaging, panoramic acquisition of objects, 3D laser scanning of painted surfaces, photogrammetry and 3D modeling. These techniques are widely used in the restoration and conservation world and are considered valuable tools that allow us to perform regular and accurate monitoring of works of art, in order to measure their state of conservation and compare them with previous analyses. Unfortunately, the level of accuracy in acquiring information produces huge quantities of data, which need to be visualized and disseminated in several different ways. The resulting images must also be accessible to various partners around the world via the Internet, but the data needs to be protected and, because of the vast quantity involved, requires careful handling and management. This paper describes several new developments that have been made at the C2RMF in order to make extremely high-resolution images available on-line using the IIP protocol. In this paper we are presenting a case study based on the use, the manipulation and the sharing of high-resolution colorimetric images among members of the museum research community. The resulting system is a lightweight client-server architecture that efficiently streams image data to the client, allowing the user to quickly view very large images even over a slow Internet connection. These developments have been released as open source software in the IIPImage project.