Texture Vision: A View from Art Conservation

Abstract

The appreciation of many works of visual art derives from the observation and interpretation of the object surface. The visual perception of texture is key to interpreting those surfaces, for the texture provides cues about the nature of the material and the ways in which the artist has manipulated it to create the object. The quantification of texture can be undertaken in two ways: by recording the physical topography of the surface or by analyzing an image that accurately portrays the texture. For most art objects, this description of texture on a microscopic level is not very useful, since how those surface features are observed by viewers is not directly provided by the analysis. For this reason, image analysis seems a more promising approach, for in the images the surfaces will naturally tend to be rendered as they would when viewing the object. In this study, images of textured surfaces of prototype art objects are analyzed in order to identify the methods and the metrics that can accurately characterize slight changes in texture. Three main applications are illustrated: the effect of the conditions of illumination on perceived texture, the characterization of changes of object due to degradation, and the quantification of the efficiency of the restoration.