Universität zu Köln

Hollaus, Fabian, Gau, Melanie, Sablatnig, Robert, Christens-Barry, William A. and Miklas, Heinz (2015). Readability Enhancement and Palimpsest Decipherment of Historical Manuscripts. In: Kodikologie und Paläographie im digitalen Zeitalter 3, pp. 31-46. BoD. ISBN 978-3-7347-9899-3

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Abstract

This paper presents image acquisition and readability enhancement techniques for historical manuscripts developed in the interdisciplinary project “The Enigma of the Sinaitic Glagolitic Tradition” (Sinai II Project).1 We are mainly dealing with parchment documents originating from the 10th to the 12th centuries from St. Cather- ine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. Their contents are being analyzed, fully or partly transcribed and edited in the course of the project. For comparison also other mss. are taken into consideration. The main challenge derives from the fact that some of the manuscripts are in a bad condition due to various damages, e.g. mold, washed out or faded text, etc. or contain palimpsest (=overwritten) parts. Therefore, the manuscripts investigated are imaged with a portable multispectral imaging system. This non-invasive conservation technique has proven extremely useful for the exami- nation and reconstruction of vanished text areas and erased or washed o palimpsest texts. Compared to regular white light, the illumination with speci c wavelengths highlights particular details of the documents, i.e. the writing and writing material, ruling, and underwritten text. In order to further enhance the contrast of the de- graded writings, several Blind Source Separation techniques are applied onto the multispectral images, including Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and others. Furthermore, this paper reports on other latest developments in the Sinai II Project, i.e. Document Image Dewarping, Automatic Layout Analysis, the recent result of another project related to our work: the image processing tool Paleo Toolbar, and the launch of the series Glagolitica Sinaitica.