Comment by contravariant
Comment by contravariant 2 days ago
The restoration method is more interesting than the AI, but claiming it uses AI is probably necessary to get funding for it.
Comment by contravariant 2 days ago
The restoration method is more interesting than the AI, but claiming it uses AI is probably necessary to get funding for it.
It's conceptually similar to current restoration techniques, but, the real innovation is in doing the whole thing as one piece ahead of time rather than requiring somebody to get in there with tiny brushes after a transparent base layer is completed.
It's also worth noting that this doesn't help with the first half of most restorations, which is removing crud and wear and often painstakingly undoing previous alterations or low-quality restorations. There's actually a pretty long history of paintings being altered to fit current fashions or otherwise mucked with in ways that make modern art historians cringe.
As far as I understand this only replaces the retouching phase. A human needs to do that in place in order to color and pattern match (and it's already hard enough that way). And I do not know but would assume the retouching paints can be removed without affecting the isolation layer if the conservator realises they went in the wrong direction earlier and can’t easily recover.
Yes, it seems like the same method (a thin polymer mask of which a computer record exists) could be used in a completely human-driven process. Just allowing restorers to try a few different things to see what works would probably speed up their process immensely.
There's probably some other grant money they can get down the line for a completely AI-less process, but obviously there's a lot more funding for AI than for art restoration.