3-dimensional digital fingerprint of paintings

Paintings are typically considered as more or less flat objects with color as the most relevant information. Therefore, they are mainly documented with conventional 2D techniques, which cannot record the 3D relief. However, there are many paintings, especially those with a 3D relief in the mm range, where this relief is an important feature · containing additional information about the style and brush stroke of the painter · influencing the overall visual impression of the painting and · defining, together with the color, an individual and unique fingerprint of each painting. High Definition 3D scanners, based on fringe projection technique, allow the synchronous recording of both color and 3D with an accuracy in the μm-range and a spatial resolution of 10 μm. The paper discusses the state of the art of this technique and shows various examples of the 3D documentation of famous paintings and frescos.