A Groupware for Pigment Identification in Cultural Heritage: Design and Technical Analysis

Cultural heritage preservation embodies a vast field of study aimed at maintaining ancient artifacts. Nowadays, cultural heritage investigators can make use of available non-invasive solutions able to provide useful information about materials, techniques, and retouches. Yet, investigations on artworks are manually performed with very little automation. This is due to the need for the unique expertise of human operators but also to the lack of adequate digital support. To this aim, we have designed a groupware for supporting collaborative work among cultural heritage investigators even when located far from each other. As a practical case study we have chosen the pigment identification problem in artworks and included in the groupware an automated procedure for selecting investigation areas and for matching unknown pigments on the considered artwork with known standards in a database.