Pioneering research by members of the Electronics Laboratory (School of ECE - Technical University of Crete) and its associates are included in the Research Outreach e-publications, underlining the importance and the impact on international level.
Professor Costas Balas, Director of the Electronics Laboratory (School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, TUC), and his research group, are experts in improving and developing hyperspectral imaging technologies for both medical and art conservation applications. As far as it concerns art conservation, hyperspectral imaging devices can be used to identify not just what chemicals are present in pigments on the surface layers of paintings, but also what lies underneath. Professor Balas’ interest in hyperspectral imaging was originally motivated by his work in the field of cancer diagnosis and biomedicine. In this field, there is a need for devices that can successfully and accurately profile and image tumors within the body as part of the diagnostic process, but there are a number of features of the technique that can be applied to a diverse range of applications, including art restoration and identification. Professor Balas and his team used this technology to study one of Doménikos Theotokópoulos’ (El Greco) masterpieces, "The Baptism of Christ". The goal of the project coordinated by the Benaki Museum was to provide technical information to art historians to allow them to date and authenticate the painting and to determine what the physical condition of the painting was to aid with conservation work. During this process, the team found a number of surprising results that only hyperspectral imaging could have unearthed, including the numerals ‘MDLXVI’, indicating the year 1566.
Read more about this research: https://researchoutreach.org/articles/stripping-paintings-of-their-secrets-with-hyperspectral-imaging/
