VARIM: A computer vision system for the automatic creation of high resolution reflectographic mosaics

Infrared reflectography allows to obtain an image of the underlying drawing in paintings. In this work we have designed and developed a system, which acquires a great number of reflectographic images with a high level of detail in an automatic way. After this acquisition process the images are merged using a reduced overlapping area, and a whole reflectographic mosaic of the painting is obtained. The architecture is composed of a reflectographic camera, located on a mobile structure, which allows the movement of the camera along two axes parallel to the painting, and a software application developed for handling these devices and making the mosaic. The main advantage of our system is the automatic nature of the full process, so that no intervention of the user is required. The result is a high resolution image obtained in a fast and efficient way.