[HN Gopher] A 10B Pixel Scan of Vermeer's Masterpiece
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A 10B Pixel Scan of Vermeer's Masterpiece
Author : parisianka
Score : 100 points
Date : 2021-01-24 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.micro-pano.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.micro-pano.com)
| varispeed wrote:
| I wish I could see what's between the cracks. That's maybe in
| 2026?
| rektide wrote:
| Feature request, ability to link to specific spots/zoom levels.
|
| Really really dig the 3D view. It's hard to believe it's to
| scale, but it's soo close in that maybe?!
| adenozine wrote:
| Is there some way to download this scan locally?
| mkmk wrote:
| Just curious, and respectfully... why?
| rektide wrote:
| It'd be fun to edge-detect the close in shots at a couple
| different frequencies, & use it to build a terrain map. Go
| run around the cracks in the painting.
|
| Limitless human creativity is the fun answer. ;)
| meowster wrote:
| If anyone does, can you please make a torrent so we don't
| overwhelm the site?
| miahi wrote:
| The tiles have the format https ://www.micro-
| pano.com/pearl/panos/STITCH_-
| _FULL_35x.tiles/l8/[line]/l8_[line]_[column].jpg
|
| where lines start from 001 to 219 and columns from 001 to 192
| hetspookjee wrote:
| I don't understand why they chose to present these parts as
| .jpg. Why go through the effort of creating a 10B pixels
| masterpiece, when you compress it with a lossy format like
| jpg. Or am I missing something?
|
| Also here's a working link for anyone to lazy to insert the
| numbers: https://www.micro-pano.com/pearl/panos/STITCH_-
| _FULL_35x.til...
| dagw wrote:
| _I don 't understand why they chose to present these parts
| as .jpg_
|
| I suspect that this page is primarily for getting publicity
| and 'buzz'. If you want the data for actual research I'm
| sure they have it in much better formats.
| zamadatix wrote:
| "Why go through the effort of creating a 10B pixels
| masterpiece, when you compress it with a lossy format like
| jpg. Or am I missing something?"
|
| Remember you're looking at tilesets for the web browser
| viewer on a public site, not a copy of the raw data for
| research purposes.
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| Does it make sense to look at a painting at a scale at which the
| original painter couldn't possibly have seen it?
| erdmann wrote:
| Yes, because the scan is intended to study and document the
| painter's technique as well as the state of conservation of the
| paining. Looking into the abraded painting near cracks, for
| example, we can see a layer structure that is like taking a
| virtual cross-section of the painting. (I worked on this
| project and also made the image of Rembrandt's Nightwatch at
| http://hyper-resolution.org/Nightwatch).
| rektide wrote:
| The painting has also aged & cracked significantly. Does it
| make sense to look at the painting since it does not look like
| what the painter originally made?
|
| These are parts of the art artifact we have, and there are just
| lovely amazing details. They capture technique and process
| wonderfully. I could not be more thrilled to look around these
| craters & cracks & little particles of paint.
| yholio wrote:
| I wouldn't sell Vermeer's eyesight so short. The human eye has
| about 500 Mpixels. In a healthy individual, the central yellow
| spot of maybe 100 Mpixels can be zoomed in with perfect focus
| on a spot no larger than a few square cm. Sequentially looking
| at the painting in small patches from very close, you have a
| similar order of magnitude for the resolution.
| meowster wrote:
| Does anyone know if there's a database with the highest quality
| scans of different masterpieces?
| afkqs wrote:
| You can find a few paintings scanned in high quality here:
| https://artsandculture.google.com/project/art-camera
|
| Rembrandt's self-portrait is one of my favourites:
| https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/self-portrait/-gHQe8...
| Grakel wrote:
| This would be so great if you could download the images. Is
| there any way to do that?
| zappo2938 wrote:
| The main page of the microscopes website has a youtube video
| showing the process.
| chaboud wrote:
| I'm disappointed that the illumination is not uniform in the
| stitch. Artifacts from the sampling and stitching leave subtle
| bands in the output that I'm fairly confident are not in the
| original. This is likely a biproduct of using some non-uniform
| scope-attached illuminator and not having sufficient overlap in
| their sampling.
|
| Nonetheless, when zoomed in, the detail is impressive.
| Tepix wrote:
| Indeed, looks like with the illumination at hand there should
| have been more overlap in the scan process. The original is not
| striped!
|
| Anyway, phantastic piece of art and it's great to have the
| opportunity to look _real_ close!
| notretarded wrote:
| Oh, aren't you so clever. Why not contact the author and tell
| them your suggestions instead of just whinging about it in
| your armchair. I'm sure that whomever made this work would
| never have thought of any of the techniques you came up with.
| erdmann wrote:
| I worked on this project. The images were indeed captured by a
| 3D microscope in about 9000 separate captures with non-uniform
| illumination, so this isn't so much a stitching artifact as it
| is an illumination artifact. The specular component of the
| varnish and the different illumination angles of the light
| sources make it almost impossible to capture a uniformly-
| colored field without the use of polarization filters, and the
| best stitching algorithms don't do well with different opinions
| from multiple images about the color of a pixel (they do fine
| with different opinions about brightness).
| thomas43 wrote:
| have you tried to extract the vignetting pattern form the
| captures and using it to normalize them? My first try would
| be to calculate the median grayscale image of all 9000
| captures and then using this to normalize the intensity.
| erdmann wrote:
| Yes, and the vignetting pattern isn't so much the problem.
| It's a color distortion problem (spatially varying
| _chromaticity_ rather than brightness that is not just a
| function of the position within the field of view but also
| of the underlying material, unfortunately). So there isn 't
| a nice way to correct each capture in a predictable way to
| ensure that overlapping pixels have the same colors
| consistently.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| I've worked with similar problems for agricultural
| mapping from drone images. You would need to build a BRDF
| model for the different colour channels for various types
| of materials, then assign the material based on a
| combination of best representative models. Then you can
| re-render with uniform normal lighting.
| thomas43 wrote:
| i see. interesting problem
| nr2x wrote:
| Fantastic work, congratulations. Hope to see more of these.
| chaboud wrote:
| For purposes of browsing, you can source your top-level
| "zoomed out" layer from a single photograph and blend at
| lower tiles in the quad tree or normalize the downsampled
| capture data against a reference.
|
| Nonetheless, thanks for doing this. It's an amazing piece of
| work.
| ezconnect wrote:
| Was the 3D effect made from different focus points?
| tomerico wrote:
| Very likely. The focus stacking software (such as Helicon)
| can output the 3d object in addition to the stacked image
| erdmann wrote:
| The very limited depth of field of a microscope
| necessitates doing depth stacking for every field of view.
| This is done automatically by the apparatus. As a side
| effect, it gives a heightmap, but with the lens used for
| the whole-painting scan (what HIROX calls "35x",
| corresponding to ~5 um sampling resolution), the elevations
| are not reliable, especially near the edge of the field.
| For selected areas, a higher magnification was used that
| gives much more reliable elevations. Sadly, only a small
| fraction of the painting was imaged using this higher
| resolution, so the 3D data is spotty.
| jahlove wrote:
| Would it be hard to have uniform illumination?
| erdmann wrote:
| Yes, because the surface isn't flat. At these
| magnifications, any given field of view may be tilted
| toward one of the light sources, changing the relative
| contribution of the specular reflection off of the varnish
| as well as the reflected color from the paint surface. The
| apparatus doesn't have the ability to tilt to maintain a
| constant angle to the surface; it can only pan in the x-y
| plane and do focus stacking in the z-direction.
| Additionally, the left and right light sources were hand-
| positioned and there is no way to calibrate their exact
| geometry and relative brightness and color.
| jahlove wrote:
| thanks for explaining!
| supernova87a wrote:
| I wonder, for some of the heavy brushstrokes Impressionists, a
| lidar scan would almost be appropriate. Some of the paintings
| where the paint is in physical clumps on the canvas, it has its
| own 3d quality to it that looks different from different angles.
| I don't think it will get captured with a single image taken from
| straight on.
|
| Like this: https://3dprint.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/11/iris.jpg
| madsbuch wrote:
| On the page orignially linked page, there is actually a link to
| a 3D presentation of the image: http://hirox-
| europe.com/PEARL/3D/
| dagw wrote:
| That should have been the main link. I found that far more
| interesting.
| notretarded wrote:
| There's literally a 3D button.
| bastih wrote:
| Good post to plug the documentary "Tim's Vermeer" (
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/), which is a joy to watch
| as they try to reverse-engineer the particular style Vermeer
| painted in.
| vmilner wrote:
| Yes - I hope the Music Lesson gets a similar scan - if the
| Queen agrees...
| jobigoud wrote:
| There are parts under the eyes and on the nose where there is
| material _on top_ of the cracks. Is this from a restoration
| effort?
| [deleted]
| unangst wrote:
| Brilliant. Looking forward to this new documentation technique
| for irreplaceable treasures.
| zamadatix wrote:
| If you click the "3D" button at the bottom you can view a tile in
| 3D in the browser http://hirox-europe.com/PEARL/3D/
|
| That page also has a link to a YouTube video describing what,
| how, and why they made this scan
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU
| malwarebytess wrote:
| This is incredible work. The 3D component is superb. The effort
| is clearly apparent. I spent half an hour fiddling with the thing
| before I realized what had happened. This must have significant
| value to archivists.
|
| I want to plug a documentary in which someone invents a tool in
| an attempt to replicate a Vermeer. The documentary supposes that
| Vermeer may have used such a tool. It's an interesting cross
| section of art, engineering, and history.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer
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(page generated 2021-01-24 23:02 UTC)