The frieze of the Palace of the stuccoes, dated between the 5 th and 6 th century BC, was a polychrome Maya relief discovered in the 1907 in Yucatán, Mexico. It was documented in watercolours and hand tinted photographs by Adela Breton. After years of exposure to the harsh environmental conditions of the Maya area, the colours and the stucco relief disappeared. The aim of the project is to develop a hybrid digital-analogue printing method for reconstructing the appearance of the original polychrome relief based on digitised hand-made records.<br/> A description of the process to produce full colour images combining digital and photomechanical printing is provided. Using photopolymer plates, an intaglio printing process has been used to produce colour images, whilst inverse relief plates have been created based on height maps to transfer a positive embossing on paper when applying pressure on a printing press. The influence of physical parameters related to the appearance is studied. Reflectance Transformation Imaging was carried out to record the colour and surface shape of the prints. Measurements of gloss were made on relief inkjet prints and intaglio prints on paper to compare the outcomes of commercial 2.5D print and the method proposed here.<br/> By modifying an analogue process with digital technology, it is possible to incorporate ancient materials to the printmaking process and therefore approach naturally the appearance of the original. On the other hand, incorporating imaging techniques and quality measurements enables to improve the quality in analogue printing techniques.
This paper aims at investigating the ancient Chinese textile in order to facilitate the growing trend of an interdisciplinary study between art history, industrial design and imaging science. This is an early attempt to study how decorative patterns of the textiles were created with various weaving techniques with the help of digital technology. Since the captured fabric image only reveals the floating yarn, the combination of the underneath yarns are unknown. From the mathematical point of view, the weaving technique can be regarded as a research problem of combinatorics that contains how the yarns of weft and warp intersect with each other. Hence, the analysis of the weaving pattern contains two layers: (a) detection of the floating yarn and (b) estimation of the combination of the underneath yarns. Previously, the regular bands (RB) method is a tool for regularity analysis that has been successfully applied to patterned fabric inspection. This paper achieves the first layer goal, which applies computer vision technique in the imaging science through the RB method to achieve the detection of the floating yarns of images of some ancient Chinese textiles. Ancient textile samples from Ming dynasty, China (ca. 1368-1644 CE) are utilized for the experiments in the paper.