Prague, July 23 (CTK) – IT experts from Brno’s Technical University have developed a phone application that can easily recognise whether a painting is the original or a fake, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) wrote on Monday.
To use the One-Prove application, one only needs to take a photo of the given painting with a cell phone. The application promptly browses its database of original paintings and tells whether the examined work is the original, the daily writes.
The new system can be used by gallery and museum operators, art dealers as well as fans of art, the paper continues.
Statistical figures show that trade in fine art has been flourishing in the Czech Republic with the annual turnover of about 1.3 billion crowns. For some buyers, the purchase of paintings, mainly by Czech modern authors, is a preferred investment. Their interest in contemporary authors is also growing, Pravo writes.
“At the initiative of insiders, we started pondering on ways to make the trade in fine arts more transparent two years ago. At present our [newly developed] system is being tested by Swiss and U.S. companies that deal with the verification of the genuiness of famous works of arts,” Kamil Behun told Pravo on behalf of the application authors.
He said the OneProve database already contains several thousand works of art. The application can not only distinguish a picture’s original from plagiarism but even distinguish between two identical pictures, both printed on the same printer.
“The system is very accurate. It prevents a human hand from making a replica that could be taken for the original,” Behun said.
The application includes the database and information about the pictures in it.
When buying a picture, the buyer mostly turns to an expert and has the genuiness of the picture verified by him. Pictures verified this way are added to the application’s database.
If such a picture is loaned to an exhibition abroad, its owner can use the application to see whether the picture returning from the exhibition is really the loaned one, Pravo writes.
Petra Young, director of the AAA-Antikvity Art Aukce company, said the French police have a computer system focusing on plastic arts, which, however, focuses on uncovering fakes and, unlike OneProve, it does not serve as a verified public database.
