EUROGRAPHICS Workshop on Graphics and Cultural Heritage (2023) Poster H. Graf, S. Pescarin, and S. Rizvic (Editors) The Scream (ca. 1910) through the Years: from Photographic Documentation to Spatio-Temporal Modelling I. Ciortan1, G. Trumpy1, I. Sandu2 and H. Bjørngård2 1Department of Computer Science, NTNU Gjøvik, Norway 2Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway Abstract The Scream (ca. 1910) is one of Edvard Munch’s representations of the well-known scene of a man awestruck by the beauty and colors of the sunset over the fjord, painted in oil and tempera on cardboard. Given the age of the artwork, it is expected that its appearance has significantly changed since its creation to the current state. Previous studies found that the yellow and dark red hues that depict the sky are especially sensitive to moisture and light exposure, respectively. In addition, several film photographs were taken of the painting between 1970 and 2003. In this work, we aim to use these photographs in an attempt to model the changes that the artwork withstood, and reconstruct its past appearance. We perform color correction of the photographs, by comparing the unfaded values in the films against reference values in the current version of the painting. To define the reference values, we use the existing knowledge on the highly sensitive areas and other damages that occured to the painting. Finally, we obtain a color transformation function that facilitates the digital rejuvenation of the painting appearance. CCS Concepts • Applied computing →Fine arts; • Computing methodologies →Model development and analysis; 1. Introduction Digital rejuvenation [BBC∗06] estimates the past appearance of a painting, and is of high interest for art historians, conser- vators, museum curators, educators and the general public. In the last decade, several approaches were proposed in this sense, where scientific data collected from an artwork (such as spec- tral reflectance, elemental maps, fading behaviour) are coupled with analytical [ZvdLL19, CPGH23] and physically-based mod- els [KLL∗18] and/or artistic editing in image processing software [FKHS17,Ber19,BZM∗22]. In some fortunate cases, information with respect to a painting’s composition and previous appearance can be retrieved from doc- umentary sources and archival records, where a good example is given by Vincent van Gogh’s letters describing his artistic process to his brother [vG]. Similarly, photographs from the past can repre- sent a useful piece of information to monitor the change of an art- work [SKR∗16]. However, photographic documentation presents an important challenge, that of accurate color calibration. This is especially problematic for film photographs, that are themselves subject to degradation due to dye decay, and are generated with complex photo-chemical processes.For instance, in an attempt to restore the film photographs of Brazilian artist Candido Portinari, Leão [Lea11] found a lower stability for the colour patches of the Kodak Q-13 control target with respect to the grayscale patches. In this work, we intend to develop a novel color correction method for the film photographs of The Scream (ca. 1910) in Munch Museum’s collection that provides the artwork’s accurate colors at the time in which the image was taken. Our approach is to obtain the color transformation relying on ground-truth scien- tific data that characterizes the materials in the painting and their aging behaviour. This is somewhat similar to the idea of Stenger et al. [SKR∗16] who use the unfaded parts of Rothko’s Harvard mu- rals in the creation of the digital reconstruction. However, differ- ent from [SKR∗16], we include the map of unfaded regions in the film color correction stage. The ultimate purpose of our proposed method is to employ the existing photographic documentation to- wards the digital rejuvenation of The Scream (ca. 1910). As a support to our work stands an extensive prior investigation of The Scream [SATCT10,CSR∗19,MCR∗20