Cultural heritage (archaeological artefacts, works of art, architecture and texts) surround us. Extracting information about the composition, structure and process of creation allows us to understand better their historical, cultural and social contexts and to identify any degradation and previous conservation treatments. However, achieving this in a non-destructive way, and in some cases in-situ, is a complex process requiring multi-disciplinary technical approaches.
Creating a process where current knowledge and conventional techniques from the technical art history community are used to inform the development of smart ICT strategies such as spectral compressive sensing and 4D spatio-spectral imaging.
Cross-disciplinary collaboration underpins our approach to meeting this challenge. We aim to to design new photonic and computational strategies by combining recent advances in ICT with established technical art history techniques for analysis and with data from object case studies, art historical context and historically accurate reconstructions. In turn, these new strategies will improve our support for interpretation and conservation, revealing new insights into cultural heritage objects.