InsightART is ADVACAM’s subsidiary company, which uses our detectors to analyse historic artworks, helping to detect forgeries.
The company is making novel use of the Timepix 256 x 256-pixel silicon sensor detector. The key to its effectiveness is that each pixel – about 55 micrometers square, around half the thickness of an average human hair – processes radiation and sends signals independently from all the other pixels, capturing very high levels of detail.
In CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and other particle accelerators, Timepix sensors deliver 3D snapshots of charged particle tracks. In orbit they accomplish similar tasks.
InsightART is using this inherent sensitivity of the devices to investigate artworks in a way that was previously only possible using huge synchrotron particle accelerators – which are both rare and hard to access. For that reason, the technology has mostly been used for space exploration and
A standard X-ray of a painting can show underlying detail hidden by the top layer of paint. InsightART’s Timepix-based sensing device can ‘expose’ every individual pigment separately. Each pigment can be assigned a colour to help with visual analysis, and a filtering process can show only brush strokes made with a specific pigment, such as lead paint.
Read the full article here
Watch ADVACAM s.r.o. CTO Josef Uher talk about InsightART in the video below.
