Development of a High-Definition and Multispectral Image Capturing System for Digital Archiving of Early Modern Tapestries of Kyoto Gion Festival

We developed a two-shot 6-band image capturing system consisting of a large-format camera, a customized interference filter, and a scanning digital back to capture a 185-M-pixel images. The interference filter is set in front of the camera lens to obtain a 6-band image, that is, two 3-band images, one taken with the filter and the other without it. After correction of optical aberrations caused by the interference filter as well as system arrangement errors, the two images are combined into a 6-band image. The 6-band image was converted into a color-managed RGB image embedded ICC profile. In experiments, object images were captured as several divided parts and synthesized as almost 500-M-pixel image by using an image stitching technique. Resolution of the captured images is 0.02 mm/pixel. This paper discusses the camera system with its focus on some early modern tapestries used in the Kyoto Gion Festival. After the experiments, we interviewed a craftsman to assess the image´s importance in archiving and analyzing fabric structures.