Using artificial intelligence, the museum scans a 17th-century masterpiece into an image of 44.8 billion pixels

A museum in Amsterdam has just published a scanned copy of the night watch – The Night Watch of artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn online: it is so detailed that you can see on the paintings of a hundred-year-old palm line or the crack of color patches appear after many years. Thanks to this scan, we can admire every corner of the painting.

You can view the “digitized” version with all 44.8 gigapixels here.

The Night View is 3.3 meters high and 4.2 meters wide, created by Rembrandt in 1642. The new scan posted on the Internet is part of an ongoing art conservation project; Not only is uploading a high-resolution picture online, this effort is also helped by machine learning software.

” The image processing team of the Rijksmuseum, led by data scientist Robert Erdmann, created Night View from 528 exposure photos ,” wrote the blog post of the Rijksmuseum.

“ 24 rows of 22 images are put together on a computer, a neural net helps a part. The final image weighs 44.8 gigapixel, the distance between each pixel is 20 micrometers. This allows scientists to study the picture from afar. The photo also allows us to monitor the degradation process over time . ”

The Rijksmuseum Museum’s Instagram post details the 44.8 gigapixel photo process.

The process of creating an image using a scan technique called macro-XRF, scanning the picture is long and effortless. According to Ms. Annelies van Loon, one of the researchers involved in the project, each scan only observed an area equal to 58cm x 78cm of the painting. Scanning a single line also takes up to 21.5 hours.

” It took us two months to scan the entire surface with macro-XRF technology, ” researcher Van Loon wrote on Instagram.

The macro-XRF engine uses a variety of image-editing techniques in each scan, including x-rays, to see through each layer of paint.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Rijksmuseum is temporarily closed. Fortunately, thanks to the Night Watch Campaign, everyone can sit at home enjoying Rembrandt’s masterpiece, with the level of detail not possible even when you’re in front of a museum piece.