Reproduction of gloss, color and relief of paintings using 3D scanning and 3D printing

Abstract

High fidelity reproductions of paintings provide new opportunities to museums in preserving and providing access to cultural heritage. This paper presents an integrated system which is able to capture and fabricate color, relief and gloss of a painting's surface, emphasizing on gloss capturing. To measure the spatially varying gloss, the specular reflection of the center of the scanned area is sampled at the Brewster angle, utilizing the effect of reflectance polarization at this angle. The off-center gloss measurements are corrected using the perpendicular and parallel reflectance coefficients, relative to the center measurement. Shadows in the gloss map, which are caused by 3D relief of the surface, are masked based on the height map and then filled by interpolating surrounding gloss information. The captured color image, height map and gloss map are inputs for the 3D printer. A painting "Two wrestling figures in the style of Van Gogh" was reproduced to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system. Experiment results indicate that the proposed system gives accurate enough gloss measurement of the painting's surface for the purpose of gloss fabrication.