HP Labs India

HP Labs Helps Digitally Preserve and Disseminate the Art of India

On March 4, HP announced a new collaboration between HP Labs, HP Philanthropy, India's National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), and the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to digitally preserve and disseminate Indian art in the form of paintings from Indian masters. The goal is to use HP equipment to capture, store, and make available via the Internet selected works from some of India's most prominent artists, including 200 paintings of Rabindranath Tagore, India's celebrated writer and painter and first Nobel Laureate, and Amrita Sher-Gill, arguably India’s first woman painter. The project will also explore revenue-generation opportunities for the museum via services such as printing of reproductions on demand.

		A team of researchers from HP Labs India and HPL's Imaging Systems Lab will support BrandWorks, a third-party specializing in digital imaging, to provide museum-quality image capture, proofing, storage, cataloging and printing of the works of these world-renowned artists on HP equipment including servers and DesignJet printer. C-DAC will create the digital library using HP servers and storage and will handle long-term program implementation. HP & C-DAC will also provide personnel training to NGMA in order that the Gallery may undertake more digitization work in the future.

This project is a first step towards building the kind of research collaborations that HP Labs enjoys with the leading museums around the world, including the National Gallery in London, the Center of Research and Restoration of the Museums of France and several other museums in Europe. Using a comprehensive suite of HP technologies, scientists capture images in extraordinary detail using digital cameras, store and process the images on workstations, develop new color pallets and drivers to match the individual works, and print realistic reproductions on large format printers.

		By digitizing art in this way, not only is art preserved for posterity, it is made available to a large audience of specialists and the art-loving public, while minimizing the handling of the original pieces. Digitization also facilitates restoration and cataloguing.

This project was announced publicly in India this week at a Press Conference and a special event in Bangalore called “When Art Meets Technology” featuring Dr. S. Ramani, Research Director of HP Labs India, Debra Dunn, SVP of Corporate Affairs, Neerja Raman, Director of Imaging Systems Lab at HPL, R.K.Arora, Executive Director of C-DAC and Prof. Rajeev Lochan, Director of the NGMA among the speakers. A number of local galleries and museums and artists attended the event to mark the launch of the project, as was Dick Lampman, SVP Research and Director of HP Labs.

Launch Event Program

The HP – C-DAC Initiative in Digital Preservation & Dissemination of Art