Fig 10 - uploaded by Graziano Ranocchia
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(a) The criss-crossed fibre structure of the sheets of the phantom papyrus; (b) left: the fibre texture of the sheet segmented from the innermost part of the original papyrus roll PHerc. 495, (b) right: the sheet of PHerc. 495 from the external part of PHerc. 495.
Source publication
After the first recent attempts at virtually opening and reading Herculaneum papyri, a new enhanced method for virtual unfolding and peeling of ancient unopened papyrus rolls has been developed. This new algorithms-based and semi-automatic procedure allowed to investigate with high resolution the 3D internal structure of two ancient papyrus rolls f...
Citations
... There is no indication. In Bukreeva et al. (2017) an image of a layer virtually removed from P.Herc. 375 is provided. ...
In 2016 the Digital Restoration Initiative (DRI) at the University of Kentucky, under the direction of Professor Brent Seales, virtually unrolled a carbonized parchment scroll from Ein Gedi, revealing a copy of Leviticus written in iron gall ink. In 2019 the DRI applied a new machine learning method to reveal a Greek character written in carbon ink from an actual Herculaneum papyrus fragment. Virtual unwrapping of cultural heritage objects is a reality. The application of machine and deep learning methods to enhance difficult-to-detect ink signals in tomography will continue to evolve. This raises an important question. How will the process of editing texts that are ‘true-born virtual’ (the object can never be opened to verify the results) change to reflect the presence and dependency on AI? This paper produces a theoretical model for how a critical edition of a virtually unwrapped papyrus text must document the role of the machine. It also engages the possible requirements, in terms of Data Science, that this new type of text compels in order to ensure transparency at the level of its ‘birth’. Put simply, a new virtual edition model that is a fusion of humanities and science is needed.
... In the last few years many other research groups have been working on the topic of recovery of information from scanned documents, many using synchrotron radiation micro-CT. However, most are limited in various ways, such as: proof of concept systems still operating with phantoms or simple test material [7][8][9][10][11] ; scanning without attempting to segment the artifact [12][13][14] ; processing artifacts with sufficiently simple geometry that the segmentation can be performed with minimal manual interaction 15 ; restricting attention to small portions of the data so that manual interaction becomes feasible 16,17 . ...
There is a large body of historical documents that are too fragile to be opened or unrolled, making their contents inaccessible. Recent improvements in X-ray scanning technology and computer vision techniques make it possible to perform a "virtual" unrolling of such documents. We describe a novel technique to process a stack of 3D X-ray images to identify the surface of parchment scrolls, unroll them, and create a visualization of their written contents. Unlike existing techniques, we can handle even challenging cases with minimal manual interaction. Our novel approach was deployed on two 15th and 16th century damaged historic scrolls from the manors of Bressingham and Diss Heywood. The former has become fused, probably due to exposure to moisture, and cannot be fully unrolled. The latter was severely burnt several hundred years ago, becoming thoroughly charred, heat-shrunken, and distorted, with all the sheets now brittle and fused together. Our virtual unrolling revealed text that has been hidden for centuries.
