2007 / TCAP founded by Rick Johnson (Cornell)
following success with one-dimensional Fourier transform in counting
threads crossing a test line drawn on a digitized x-radiograph of
a van Gogh painting in the collection of the
Van Gogh Museum.
2008 / Cornell students supervised by Rick Johnson
compose computer-assisted hand count dataset for
1000 two cm squares extracted from x-radiographs
of van Gogh paintings
used to determine winning algorithms among those provided by teams
from University of Wisconsin, WPI, and Rice University.
2009 / As architect of winning thread-counting software
(based on two-dimensional Fourier transform),
Don Johnson (Rice) joins Rick Johnson as co-director of TCAP.
2009 / First published weave maps and weave
pattern match presented at annual
AIC meeting.
2009 / First
TCAP annual report
distributed.
2010 / Rob Erdmann (Arizona) joins Rick Johnson and Don
Johnson as a co-director
of TCAP and adds his big data computing/visualization
skills - including composite image stitching software.
2010 / The relationship between weave matches
and rollmate status described at annual
AIC meeting.
2010 / Second
TCAP annual report
distributed.
2011 / First journal paper on utility of spectral-based
thread counting appears in
Studies in Conservation.
2011 /
TCAP status report
indicating reorganization
by museum/artist/project rather than technical tasks in response
to expanding workload, as the number of paintings
examined exceeds 600.
2011 / Weave maps from TCAP included in
new
on-line catalog of impressionists at Art Institute of Chicago.
2012 / First papers appear in art history journals
-
The Burlington Magazine and the
Metropolitan Museum Journal -
illustrating the art historical uses of automated thread
counting and weave matching in studies of
paintings by
van Gogh,
Velazquez,
and
Vermeer.
2013 / A full description of the
algorithms used
for thread counting and weave matching is published in
the technical journal
Signal Processing.
2013 / Rick Johnson and Don Johnson speak
on their multi-year effort to "count" van Gogh at the Symposium on
"Van Gogh's Studio Practice in Context" in conjunction
with the exhibition "Van Gogh at Work" at the Van Gogh Museum.
2013 / Papers on
weft snakes
and
interpreting weave matches
appear in on-line conservation journal
Art Matters.
2013 / Rick Johnson steps down as a co-director of TCAP to put more
time into computational art history for paper, e.g. 20th century
photographic paper and
laid paper in pre-1750 prints, and Rob Erdmann assumes lead
role in TCAP and its
extension via
advanced visualization tools.
2014 / A dataset of TCAP
composites of scanned x-radiographs of 10 paintings on canvas
in the collections of the Van Gogh Museum and
the Rijksmuseum is made available
through the
Netherlands Insitute for Art History, thereby enabling other signal processing researchers
to develop their own automated thread counting schemes.