Museum Uses AI To Scan A 17th-Century Masterpiece Into A 44.8-Billion-Pixel Image

A museum in Amsterdam has just uploaded online a scanned copy of the Night Watch of artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. The image looks so detailed that you can even see on the hundred-year-old painting cracks that started appearing after many years. Thanks to this scan, we get to admire every aspect of the painting.

The Night Watch painting is 3.3 meters high and 3.2 meters wide, drawn by Rembrandt back in 1642. The new scan posted on the Internet is part of an ongoing art conservation project. And it is a product of machine learning software.

In a blogpost, the Rijksmuseum wrote that the image processing team of the museum, led by data scientist Robert Erdmann, created the Night Watch painting using 528 exposure photos.

24 rows of 22 images were put together on a computer with the help of a neural network. The final image has 44.8 gigapixels. The distance between each pixel is 20 micrometers. This allows scientists to study the picture even from afar as well as monitoring the degradation process over time.

The Rijksmuseum posted on Instagram a video detailing the process of scanning the painting.

The process of creating an image using a scanning technique called macro-XRF and it requires extra effort. According to Annelies van Loon, one of the researchers taking part in the project, with each scan, they can only observe an area of 58cm x 78xm of the painting. Scanning a single line took up to 21.5 hours and one month for the whole painting.

The macro-XRF machine uses a variety of image-editing techniques in each scan including x-rays to see through each layer of the paint.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Rijkmuseum is temporarily closed. But with this technique, you can admire Rembrandt’s painting even when you can’t visit the museum.

Similarly, to keep people entertained during this time, the British Museum recently opened its online tour, offering people free visits. Thanks to the development of technology, the museum has uploaded 1.9 million paintings along with 4.5 million other artifacts on the Internet in high quality. Not only that, but people can also freely download these paintings for their personal purposes in accordance with the Creative Common 4.0 certificate.

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