The MARC project

The MARC project (Methodology for Art Reproduction in Colour) developed techniques to scan high resolution images directly from paintings and print them as acurately as possible. MARC ended in March 1996. It built on a previous ESPRIT II project, VASARI , which produced a system for high resolution colorimetric imaging of paintings. MARC involved:

Thomson Broadcast (Lead partner)
Birkbeck College, University of London
The National Gallery (London)
Crosfield Ltd (UK)
Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen: Bavarian state galleries (Munich)
CCD Videometry (Munich)
Hirmer Verlag (Munich)
Schwitter (Switzerland)

The three year project ran from Dec. 1995 to May 1996. It produced an ultra-high resolution camera and a directly imaged, calibrated catalogue of paintings from a Munich museum as a final demonstration (published by Hirmer Verlag). My main involvement was in computer system design, parallel processing, acquisition and image processing software.

The new MARC camera is a more portable digital camera providing up to 20,000 by 20,000 resolution images which have high colour accuracy (around 3 just visible units). This is higher accuracy tham film, and sufficient resolution to print details simply by extracting a portion of the image file. The largest image file produced so far was around 1.6 Gbytes (a 20x20k of Holbein's Embassadors in The National Gallery).

EC page on MARC