The provenance of nephrite in China based on multi-spectral imaging technology and gray-level co-occurrence matrix

Abstract

The provenance of nephrite is the basis for the research, restoration and collection of nephrite artifacts. However, determination of provenance is not easy, because of the overlap of major, minor and trace elements in nephrite from different sources. In recent years, submicrostructural methods have been applied to probe the provenance of nephrite. However, submicrostructural imaging of nephrite could not be well preserved and quantitative analysis of these images could not be easily performed. On the basis of such a situation, this paper first introduces a non-destructive multi-spectral imaging technology, which can be used to directly obtain and record the structural images. Then, a gray-level co-occurrence matrix is adopted to establish a set of parameters to describe the characteristics of nephrite. Finally, multivariate statistical methods, including principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering, are used to achieve a visual result. This study shows that this method is a simple and effective approach to classify a limited number of samples and suggests that the method could be applied to the research on the provenance of nephrite artifacts after further improvement.