Reproducing... Recreating Paintings

Nov. 20, 2018, Cambridge (MS) . The full paper by Rachel Gordon | CSAIL, MIT News

The empty frames hanging inside the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum serve as a tangible reminder of the world’s biggest unsolved art heist. While the original masterpieces may never be recovered, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) might be able to help, with a new system aimed at designing reproductions of paintings.

RePaint uses a combination of 3-D printing and deep learning to authentically recreate favorite paintings — regardless of different lighting conditions or placement. RePaint could be used to remake artwork for a home, protect originals from wear and tear in museums, or even help companies create prints and postcards of historical pieces.

“If you just reproduce the color of a painting as it looks in the gallery, it might look different in your home,” says Changil Kim, one of the authors on a new paper about the system, which will be presented at ACM SIGGRAPH Asia in December. “Our system works under any lighting condition, which shows a far greater color reproduction capability than almost any other previous work.”