A MIT student has developed a new technique to restore the old paintings. By combining artificial intelligence with an inkjet printer, he can do work in a few hours that usually requires months.
Artificial intelligence is perceived as a threat to current artists, capable of reproducing their stylesstyles in a few seconds. But this same capacity can also come to the aid of older works of art, thanks to a new catering technique developed by Alex Kachkine, a MIT student (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
In an article published in the journal Natureit describes its method which allows you to apply a digital restoration directly on an original table. Methods already exist, using AI to identify the damage suffered by tables over time, such as cracks or colorscolors Dismoured, and can be used to guide a restoration. They also make it possible to create a digital double without all these faults and faithful to the artist’s style. However, this new technique goes even further since it can apply the touch -ups directly on the table, and thus restore it just a few hours.
This method of restoring paintings superimposes two fine films with a layer of white and a layer of color. © Alex Kachkine, put
A reversible technique
This new technique uses two layers of a film polymerpolymer very fine that are placed on the board. Using an inkjet printer, it prints a first white layer and a second color in color, containing all the necessary touch -ups. The two films are then glued to the table using a varnishvarnishand aligned carefully by hand. The polymer can be easily dissolved using solutions already used in the restoration of tables if it is needed in the future to carry out a new restoration.
This technique does not avoid the preparation of the table beforehand, with the cleaning and withdrawal of previous restorations. But it can then be applied to a table in just 3.5 hours; The MIT student believes that this work would have required nine months of part -time work if he had done it by hand. In addition to being reversiblereversiblethis technique has the advantage of keeping a digital copy of all the changes made. Thus, anyone studying the table in the future will know what changes have been made and why. However, the man highlights the importance that any restoration of this type is made with the supervision of a curator-restaurant.
