Enhancement of MultiSpectral Images of Ancient Manuscripts

Abstract

This work is concerned with MultiSpectral Imaging (MSI) and image processing of ancient manuscripts. The writings imaged are partially in a bad condition, since they are partially faded-out or have been erased and overwritten. Therefore, a transcription by philologists belonging to our project team is aggravated. In order to increase the legibility, the manuscripts investigated have been imaged with a portable MSI system. While the imaging in selected narrow spectral ranges gained a legibility increase, post-processing techniques can be applied to the MSI data in order to gain a further contrast enhancement. For this purpose, three different dimension reduction techniques are applied to the manuscripts. A qualitative analysis shows that these techniques are capable of increasing the legibility of the ancient writings, compared to unprocessed multispectral images.