Research Article Optical Coherence Tomography for Tracking Canvas Deformation

in particular in its spectral mode (SOCT), to track-ing of deformations in paintings on canvas caused by periodical humidity changes are presented. The setup is able to monitor the position of a chosen point at the surface of a painting with micrometre precision, simultaneously in three dimensions, every 100 seconds. This allows recording of deformations associated with crack formation. For the particular painting model examined, it was shown that the surface moves in-plane towards the corner, and bulges outwards (Z-direction) in response to a rise in humid-ity. Subsequent to the first humidification/drying cycle, translation in the Z-direction is decreased, whilst in-plane translations increase somewhat. It was also shown that the response of the painting on canvas begins immediately on changing the relative humidity in the surroundings. Copyright © 2006 Piotr Targowski et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1