Until 2012, digitized scans of old photographic negatives, acquired
by Alfons Dierick [12] and kept in the archives of Ghent University,
were the only available high-resolution data set of The Ghent
Altarpiece. The development process of these negatives was
mainly undocumented, which resulted in a data set where the
images vary strongly in quality. Earlier reported results of digital
image processing on The Ghent Altarpiece, such as crack detection,
virtual crack inpainting [7], [24], and pearl analysis [23],
were all based on images from that old data set.
We report the results on extremely high-resolution images
that are publicly available in [31]. This data set is the result of an
interdisciplinary research project that ran from April 2010 until
June 2011, with the goal to assess the structural condition of The
Ghent Altarpiece and determine whether a full restoration of van
Eyck’s polyptych was necessary. The surfaces of the altarpiece
were documented with the following imaging modalities: digital
macrophotography (with a pixel size of 7.2 nm; full panels, 140
extreme close-ups, and some cleaning tests), infrared macrophotography
(in the same resolution), infrared reflectography, and
X-radiography. New acquisitions will be added to this data set in
the scope of the current conservation-restoration campaign.