Raiders of the Lost Art
This addresses a specific challenge in art restoration and cultural heritage, though it is incremental as it builds on existing neural style transfer techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of reconstructing lost artwork by applying neural style transfer to x-radiographs of paintings with hidden layers, enabling the recreation of underlying artworks.
Neural style transfer, first proposed by Gatys et al. (2015), can be used to create novel artistic work through rendering a content image in the form of a style image. We present a novel method of reconstructing lost artwork, by applying neural style transfer to x-radiographs of artwork with secondary interior artwork beneath a primary exterior, so as to reconstruct lost artwork. Finally we reflect on AI art exhibitions and discuss the social, cultural, ethical, and philosophical impact of these technical innovations.