Visualization of the color change of a painting after digital cleaning

Abstract

We propose two methods for visualizing the color change that occurred to a painting image after digital cleaning. The color change between original and digitally-cleaned image was computed as a vector difference in RGB space. For the first visualization, the vector difference was projected on a neutral color and rendered for the whole image. The second visualization rendered the color change as a translucent layer that can be superimposed on a white image or on the digitally-cleaned image. The resulting color change visualizations were consistent with the actual perceived color change and could offer valuable insights to a painting’s color changing process due to exposure.