Image Acquisition & Processing Routines for Damaged Manuscripts

• Main Authors: Melanie Gau, Heinz Miklas, Martin Lettner, Robert Sablatnig
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2011-03-01
• Series: Digital Medievalist
• Subjects: Image Acquisition; Processing; Manuscripts; Codicology; Palaeography; Multi-Spectral Imaging; Foreground-Background Separation; Graphemic Character Segmentation; Damaged Manuscripts; Palimpsests; Digital Palaeography
• Online Access: https://journal.digitalmedievalist.org/articles/25

This paper presents an overview of data acquisition and processing procedures of an interdisciplinary project of philologists and image processing experts aiming at the decipherment and reconstruction of damaged manuscripts. The digital raw image data was acquired via multi-spectral imaging. As a preparatory step we developed a method of foreground-background separation (binarisation) especially designed for multi-spectral images of degraded documents. On the basis of the binarised images further applications were developed: an automatic character decomposition and primitive extraction dissects the scriptural elements into analysable pieces that are necessary for palaeographic and graphemic analyses, writing tool recognition, text restoration, and optical character recognition. The results of the relevant procedures can be stored and interrogated in a database application. Furthermore, a semi-automatic page layout analysis provides codicological information on latent page contents (script, ruling, decorations).