July 13, 2007 — A cell phone picture could be worth a million dollars — particularly if it's a snapshot of a piece of stolen art.
A new software tool plays detective by automatically comparing cell phone photos with images in a database of stolen art. The technology could help restore stolen goods to their rightful owners and solve the hundreds of art theft cases opened each year in the United States alone.
It could also give art detectives as well as dealers, collectors and auction houses another tool to verify the authenticity of artworks for sale.
For now, the system works on paintings, carpets and coins, but the researchers already have plans to go beyond those.
"Extensions are on the way to make the system suitable for thee-dimensional objects. These extensions will cover sculptures as well as three-dimensional objects in general," said Bertram Nickolay, head of the department Security Technology at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, Germany.
Nickolay developed the technology with Christian Veenhuis, a research associate also the institute.
Databases of missing art already exist, maintained by groups such as the Art Loss Register, an international nonprofit agency, and Interpol, a worldwide criminal police organization. But these databases contain a huge assembly of descriptions and images of the stolen property that can be time-consuming for an investigator to sort through.
The image analysis software makes sorting through heaps of stolen art automatic, said Nickolay.
