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MIT student prints AI polymer masks to restore paintings in hours


Removable transparent films apply digital restorations directly to damaged artwork.

MIT graduate student Alex Kachkine once spent nine months meticulously restoring a damaged baroque Italian painting, which left him plenty of time to wonder if technology could speed things up. The mechanical engineering student conceived the idea during a 2021 cross-country drive to MIT, when gallery visits revealed how much art remains hidden due to damage and restoration backlogs. Instead, Kachkine utilized computer vision techniques found in prior art conservation research: " cross-applied colouration" for simple damages like thin cracks, and " local partial convolution" for reconstructing low-complexity patterns.

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