Square-Heating Thermography for Quantitative 3D Evaluation of Large Ancient Murals.

This work presents recent results of nondestructive health evaluation of the large Buddhist mural “Qifo shuofa tu” (seven Buddha sermon illustration) in the Palace Museum in Beijing, China. In this work, a square-heating thermography system and a thermal tomography method were developed for quantitative 3D evaluation of murals. In particular an image correction method was developed for removing all geometric and illumination distortions. This significantly helped for the seamless combination of all individual images into a single complete image and facilitated quantitative identification and locations of subsurface defects and re-patch pieces from an entire painting image. The thermography results show that this new method has great potential and capability in nondestructive testing and evaluation of large ancient murals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]