Robust Segmentation of Historical Parchment XMT Images for Virtual Unrolling

Abstract

Historical parchment scrolls are fragile, and prone to damage from a variety of causes such as fire, water, and general mistreatment. Consequently many of these scrolls cannot be unrolled, so that their contents have remained hidden for centuries. To overcome these difficulties, we have developed a method of segmenting X-ray tomographic scans of parchment which enables a ''virtual unrolling'' of these documents. After an initial segmentation we link the broken layers of the parchment. Then, junction sections are extracted from the boundaries of the parchment. Subsequently, we find the fused regions which are formed by layers stuck together, and separate them into several layers by reconstructing the missing boundaries using parallel connecting curves. Experiments on the fifteenth century Bressingham scroll validate the effectiveness of our segmentation method.