Mosaicing for high resolution acquisition of paintings

There is an every day increasing interest toward the applications of image processing techniques to the field of Cultural Heritage, the main objectives being high quality archival, image reproductions enhancement, virtual reconstruction, virtual restoration. This paper deals with the problem of setting up a simple and automatic procedure for obtaining a high resolution picture of a painting starting from a set of overlapped images showing different parts of the painting itself. With respect to other mosaicing techniques the proposed method allows to compose the whole picture even in the presence of strong colour distortions. This is possible thanks to the use of an ordinal measure as a similarity criterion for evaluating the correspondences between the images. Experimental results have demonstrated the good performances of the proposed method.