For centuries, restoring damaged art has been a painstaking endeavor, with a single painting taking anywhere from a few weeks to over a decade. In recent years, digital restoration tools have opened a window to creating virtual representations of original, restored works.
Still, there has been no way to translate digital restorations directly onto an original work, until now. Alex Kachkine, a Texas Engineering alumnus who is now a mechanical engineering graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developed a new method to physically apply a digital restoration directly onto an original painting.
The restoration is printed on a very thin polymer film, in the form of a mask that can be aligned and adhered to an original painting. It's also easy to remove and store digitally to track restoration of the painting.
“Because there’s a digital record of what mask was used, in 100 years, the next time someone is working with this, they’ll have an extremely clear understanding of what was done to the painting,” Kachkine told MIT News. “And that’s never really been possible in conservation before.”
As a demonstration, he applied the method to a highly damaged 15th century oil painting. The method automatically identified 5,612 separate regions in need of repair, and filled in these regions using 57,314 different colors. The entire process, from start to finish, took 3.5 hours, which he estimates is about 66 times faster than traditional restoration methods.
Read the full story from MIT News, and learn more about Kachkine's journey, including his time at UT where he double-majored in mechanical engineering and economics.
