Sunday, September 18, 2022

Restoring Klimt's Lost Masterworks

Gustav Klimt's mural paintings were destroyed in World War II, so they're only known from blurry black and white reproductions. But thanks to machine-learning restoration programs, they've been restored to full color. 

Jurisprudence (left) and Medicine

According to Smithsonian:

"To create the images, Google Arts and Culture and the Belvedere Museum in Vienna developed a tool that culled information about Klimt’s use of color from disparate sources. As Shanti Escalante-De Mattei reports for ARTnews, the data set included contemporary journalistic descriptions of the Faculty Paintings, 1 million pictures of the real world and 80 full-color reproductions of Klimt paintings from the same period. Google engineer Emil Wallner spent nearly six months coding the artificial intelligence (A.I.) algorithm to generate color predictions."

1 comment:

Eugene Arenhaus said...

... and the fact that color studies for them do exist didn't occur to the ML-happy crowd, I suppose? Perhaps it's more fun to pretend there were no studies and figure out the color from hearsay. ;)