AAAS 2015
January 13, 2015
Can smart phones save art?
Reporting its promising results at the 2015 AAAS, a Southern California research
collaboration has found a way to turn smart phone images into a new tool to
measure the fading of the Mona Lisa, pollution falling on Einstein’s grave, and the
growth of algae on the Blarney stone.
A longstanding problem for World Heritage—essentially those things we’d like to
pass on to future generations—is the need to monitor changes in the condition of
famous art, buildings, parks, and archaeological sites. In 2012, Drs. Eric Doehne and
Gregory Bearman were walking through Monet’s garden at Giverny outside Paris
after a meeting on “Measuring Change in Art,” sponsored by the Institute for
Advanced Studies at the University of Cergy Pontoise.
Eric recalls: “We were talking about the meeting and as we walked there were
tourists everywhere taking pictures of Monet’s amazing home. I asked Greg if there
were a way we could take some of the technology developed at NASA for calibrating
satellite cameras and use it to turn tourist photos into data.” At the time Eric was
teaching Art Conservation at Scripps College after a long career at the Getty
Conservation Institute where he worked on everything from the Sistine Chapel to
the worlds first photograph. Greg, internationally known for his imaging work on
the Dead Sea Scrolls, had recently retired from a distinguished career at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory.
The first step was to see if there were enough photos to make the effort worthwhile.
A quick study of soiling rates based on tourist photos on Flickr.com of the Duomo in
Florence was convincing. The pair then connected with HistoryPin.org and Jon Voss,
who were helping crowd source a project to geolocate and upload every historic
photo ever taken—a sort of time travel project. Here was a platform that could let
people create their own then-and-now pairs of photos. But could today’s photos be
calibrated to detect even subtle changes into the future?
After preliminary tests to see how well cell phones could measure color
(unexpectedly well, it turns out) and promising experiments with color and 3D
targets, Greg and Eric then sought out Dr. Oliver Cossairt, a computer scientist at
Northwestern University, and his graduate student, Wensen Ma, to further
collaborate on the technology needed to calibrate, register, and transform photos
into data and then detect and visualize changes quantitatively when comparing
hundreds of images of the same scene taken over weeks, months and years, even
when taken by different people using different phones, at different angles, and at
different times of day. In effect, the imaging component is “outsourced” to citizen
scientists to obtain a lot of data that can winnowed to what we can use.
Imaging Changes: Smartphone Cameras and Citizen Science Meet Heritage Conservation
AAAS 2015
Surprisingly, although astronomers have long compared images to detect new
planets, comets and earth-crossing asteroids, this seems never to have been done
before. The changes Eric cared about were things like vandalism, soling, and the
slow fading away and erosion of important bits of cultural heritage, whether Jim
Morrison’s resting place or the Statue of Liberty.
Dr. Cossairt notes, “This is one of the grand challenges set out by the NSF in 2009 for
the field of Heritage Science, and we can imagine that our work could one day be
used to highlight changes in everything—from that new rose bush in the front yard
of my house (by comparing Google Street View images), to aiding the National
Academy of Sciences in their recent investigation of looting at World Heritage
archaeological sites in Syria.”
The meeting outside Paris asked the awkward question: How do researchers
currently measure rates of change in the materials that make up our art,
architecture, archaeology, and archives? The awkward answer was that such
measurements are extremely rare in the relatively new field of Heritage Science and
that what does exist may not be readily available.
The research presented at AAAS aims to make these measurements routine and in a
format that conservators, architects, site managers and others can use in their daily
work as stewards of some of humanity’s great achievements. Fine-grain timestamped image datasets produced by the system can be imagined as data cubes or
streaming time-lapse videos. The next steps will be to refine the system, add change
detection and set it up at multiple test sites in the field. The team is in active
discussions with museums, foundations and agencies in order to expand the project.
AAAS 2015 Research Abstract: Imaging Changes: Smartphone Cameras and
Citizen Science Meet Heritage Conservation
Saturday, 14 February 2015: 8:30 AM-11:30 AM
Room LL21E (San Jose Convention Center)
AAAS 2015 Session Link:
http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2015/webprogram/Session9664.html
Abstract Link: Smartphone Cameras and Citizen Science Meet Heritage Conservation
http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2015/webprogram/Paper14393.html
For more information visit:
Gregory Bearman, ANE Image, Pasadena, CA
http://www.gregbearman.com/
Eric Doehne, Conservation Sciences and Scripps College
Imaging Changes: Smartphone Cameras and Citizen Science Meet Heritage Conservation
AAAS 2015
www.ConservationSciences.org
Wensen Ma, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
Oliver Cossairt, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~ollie/
The World Heritage List
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list
Measuring Change Expert Meeting:
www.researchgate.net/publication/260021221_Expert_Meeting_Measuring_Change
_in_Art
Imaging Changes: Smartphone Cameras and Citizen Science Meet Heritage Conservation