SVAC: Scanned Vertical Artwork Cloud

In an earlier TSB funded FastTrack Digital Art Capture project, UCL demonstrated the
feasibility of constructing a 2D scanning microscope to capture overlapping ultra-high
resolution photographs of artwork laid in the horizontal plane facing upwards. The system
was trialled by Tate Gallery who gave a very favourable review and identified a number of
possible improvements and additional functionality, which would increase the flexibility of
the system. In this new project, Worknet will work with the UCL project team to implement
some of those improvements and to integrate the scanner output with their hosted computing environment. The original project featured a total scanning area of 30 x 20 cm (A4) although it was only demonstrated over a small part of that area due to the severe lack of computing storage and processing power in the one laptop they used. In this project, the system will be tested over the full area and upgraded so as to be capable of scanning a vertically mounted artwork. This was deemed vitally important by Tate Gallery in the FastTrack project as it is neither desirable nor convenient to move fragile and valuable artwork from the vertical to the horizontal plane unnecessarily. The original novel software will be used to align and join the small images recorded by the microscope/camera but this will run on a distributed ("Cloud") platform rather than a local laptop computer.
The aim of this project is to prove the concept of a vertical scanning mechanism, and the
portability of the software onto a hosted platform.