A Fast Automatic Method for Deconvoluting Macro X-ray Fluorescence Data Collected from Easel Paintings

Abstract: Macro X-ray Fluorescence (MA-XRF) scanning is increasingly widely used by researchers in heritage science to analyse easel paintings as one of a suite of non-invasive imaging techniques. The task of processing the resulting MA-XRF datacube generated in order to produce individual chemical element maps is called MA-XRF deconvolution. While there are several existing methods that have been proposed for MA-XRF deconvolution, they require a degree of manual intervention from the user that can affect the final results. The state-of-the-art AFRID approach can automatically deconvolute the datacube without user input, but it has a long processing time and does not exploit spatial dependency. In this paper, we propose two versions of a fast automatic deconvolution (FAD) method for MA-XRF datacubes collected from easel paintings with ADMM (alternating direction method of multipliers) and FISTA (fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm). The proposed FAD method not only automatically analyses the datacube and produces element distribution maps of high-quality with spatial dependency considered, but also significantly reduces the running time. The results generated on the MA-XRF datacubes collected from two easel paintings from the National Gallery, London, verify the performance of the proposed FAD method.