Optical measurements of paintings and the creation of an artwork database for authenticity

• Published in: PloS one 2017-02, Vol.12 (2), p.e0171354-e0171354
• Main Authors: Hwang, Seonhee, Song, Hyerin, Cho, Soon-Woo, Kim, Chang Eun, Kim, Chang-Seok, Kim, Kyujung
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artists; Authenticity; Conservation; Counterfeit; Cultural heritage; Engineering and Technology; Fiber optics; Gauguin, Paul (1848-1903); Laser applications; Lasers; Medicine and Health Sciences; Optical analysis; Optical Coherence Tomography; Optical fibers; Optical measurement; Optical properties; Optics; Painting (Art); Paints; Physical Sciences; Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973); Protection and preservation; Protective coatings; Reflectance; Reliability analysis; Research and Analysis Methods; Social Sciences; Spectroscopy; Surface properties; X ray analysis
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0171354

Paintings have high cultural and commercial value, so that needs to be preserved. Many techniques have been attempted to analyze properties of paintings, including X-ray analysis and optical coherence tomography (OCT) methods, and enable conservation of paintings from forgeries. In this paper, we suggest a simple and accurate optical analysis system to protect them from counterfeit which is comprised of fiber optics reflectance spectroscopy (FORS) and line laser-based topographic analysis. The system is designed to fully cover the whole area of paintings regardless of its size for the accurate analysis. For additional assessments, a line laser-based high resolved OCT was utilized. Some forgeries were created by the experts from the three different styles of genuine paintings for the experiments. After measuring surface properties of paintings, we could observe the results from the genuine works and the forgeries have the distinctive characteristics. The forgeries could be distinguished maximally 76.5% with obtained RGB spectra by FORS and 100% by topographic analysis. Through the several executions, the reliability of the system was confirmed. We could verify that the measurement system is worthwhile for the conservation of the valuable paintings. To store the surface information of the paintings in micron scale, we created a numerical database. Consequently, we secured the databases of three different famous Korean paintings for accurate authenticity.