Dr. Ir. Bruno Cornelis

Biography

Bruno Cornelis received the Master’s degree of Industrial Engineer in Electronics from Erasmus Hogeschool Brussel (EHB), Belgium, in 2005 and the Master’s degree of Civil Electrical Engineer from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium, in 2007. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in Applied Sciences and Engineering from VUB in 2014. During his Ph.D. with the Department of Electronics and Informatics he investigated the use of various image processing tools in support of art scholarship. His research interests include statistical data analysis and sparse representations in image processing. Currently he is a postdoctoral researcher with the department of mathematics at the Duke University, USA.

Research Interest

I am currently working on several topics in the context of image processing for art investigation. The goal of my research is to provide support to the art community by means of image processing techniques. Paintings are complex structures and their analysis proves to be a useful, non-invasive tool, for many applications such as restoration, conservation, art history, material and structure characterization, authentication, dating and even style analysis. For the analysis of the painting's support as well as its pictorial layers I mostly study multimodal images of very high resolution, which is an interesting but quite challenging dataset to work with. During the past years we managed to set up a great deal of projects and established an (inter)national and interdisciplinary network. An example of such a project is the detection and visualization of crack patterns in the Ghent Altarpiece, together with several members of the department of Art, Music and Theatre sciences and the department for Telecommunications and Information Processing (TELIN) of the Ghent University. I also work closely together with Prof. David Dunson from the statistics department at Duke University (North Carolina, USA), who is a specialist in Bayesian statistics, high-dimensional data, Bayesian nonparametrics and machine learning. There is also a close partnership with the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels with whom we work on a number of case studies. I also give (together with some colleagues) the exercises of the informatics course to the first Bachelors in Engineering and Engineering-Architects. The programming language of choice is Python. These exercises are crucial for the basic understanding of any programming language. I also assist with the student projects of the Engineering-Architect students.