Cultural Heritage Destruction: Experiments with Parchment and Multispectral Imaging

This chapter describes a highly collaborative project in digital humanities, which used tools and expertise from a diverse range of disciplines: medical physics, image science, and conservation. We describe this collaboration through three examples: the use of phantoms taken from medical physics, a historically accurate model of parchment degradation, and a detailed description of the steps taken to run experiments and collect data within a manageable budget. Each example highlights how procedures from a discipline were adapted for the project through collaboration. Whilst conservation focuses on developing methods to best preserve cultural heritage documents, we describe an unusual collaboration between conservation and image science to document through multispectral imaging the deliberate damage of a manuscript. Multispectral imaging has been utilised to examine cultural heritage documents by providing information about their physical properties. However, current digitisation efforts concentrate on recording documents in their current state. In this project, we aimed at recording the process of macroscopic document degradation using multispectral imaging, and the digital recovery of the writing using standard image processing methodologies. This project’s success lay in the intersection of knowledge of the processes of parchment deterioration and the specific processes that occur when a document is imaged: this has permitted us to construct a more successful and informed experiment. The knowledge acquired during the project allows us to address the issues related to the recovery of information from damaged parchment documents, and to determine which research questions can be addressed, and through which imaging methodology

Visualising Macroscopic Deterioration of Parchment and Writing via Multispectral Images

Digital imaging technology can now produce detailed and trustworthy surrogates of historical documents. Leveraged by technological improvements in imaging and image processing, humanities scholars have been able to image, analyse, and recover more information from historical documents than was previously possible. Multispectral imaging has been utilised to examine the characteristics of documents by providing additional information about their physical properties and condition. However, current digitisation efforts have concentrated on recording documents in their current state. In this project we used multispectral imaging to record the process of macroscopic document degradation by imaging a parchment document before and after a series of degradation processes. This project is part of a larger effort to investigate the methodologies for acquiring and processing multispectral images of damaged cultural heritage documents

Colour and Colorimetry Multidisciplinary Contributions Vol. XIb

It is well known that the subject of colour has an impact on a range of disciplines. Colour has been studied in depth for many centuries, and as well as contributing to theoretical and scientific knowledge, there have been significant developments in applied colour research, which has many implications for the wider socio-economic community. At the 7th Convention of Colorimetry in Parma, on the 1st October 2004, as an evolution of the previous SIOF Group of Colorimetry and Reflectoscopy founded in 1995, the "Gruppo del Colore" was established. The objective was to encourage multi and interdisciplinary collaboration and networking between people in Italy that addresses problems and issues on colour and illumination from a professional, cultural and scientific point of view. On the 16th of September 2011 in Rome, in occasion of the VII Color Conference, the members assembly decided to vote for the autonomy of the group. The autonomy of the Association has been achieved in early 2012. These are the proceedings of the English sessions of the XI Conferenza del Colore

AIUCD2018 - Book of Abstracts

Questo volume raccoglie gli abstract dei paper presentati al Settimo Convegno Annuale AIUCD 2018 (Bari, 31 gennaio – 2 febbraio 2018) dal titolo "Patrimoni culturali nell’era digitale. Memorie, culture umanistiche e tecnologia" (Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age. Memory, Humanities and Technologies). Gli abstract pubblicati in questo volume hanno ottenuto il parere favorevole da parte di valutatori esperti della materia, attraverso un processo di revisione anonima mediante double-blind peer review sotto la responsabilità del Comitato Scientifico di AIUCD. Il programma della conferenza AIUCD 2018 è disponibile online all'indirizzo http://www.aiucd2018.uniba.it/

AIUCD2018 - Book of Abstracts

Questo volume raccoglie gli abstract dei paper presentati al Settimo Convegno Annuale AIUCD 2018 (Bari, 31 gennaio – 2 febbraio 2018) dal titolo "Patrimoni culturali nell’era digitale. Memorie, culture umanistiche e tecnologia" (Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age. Memory, Humanities and Technologies). Gli abstract pubblicati in questo volume hanno ottenuto il parere favorevole da parte di valutatori esperti della materia, attraverso un processo di revisione anonima mediante double-blind peer review sotto la responsabilità del Comitato Scientifico di AIUCD. Il programma della conferenza AIUCD 2018 è disponibile online all'indirizzo http://www.aiucd2018.uniba.it/

Realistic visualisation of cultural heritage objects

This research investigation used digital photography in a hemispherical dome, enabling a set of 64 photographic images of an object to be captured in perfect pixel register, with each image illuminated from a different direction. This representation turns out to be much richer than a single 2D image, because it contains information at each point about both the 3D shape of the surface (gradient and local curvature) and the directionality of reflectance (gloss and specularity). Thereby it enables not only interactive visualisation through viewer software, giving the illusion of 3D, but also the reconstruction of an actual 3D surface and highly realistic rendering of a wide range of materials. The following seven outcomes of the research are claimed as novel and therefore as representing contributions to knowledge in the field: A method for determining the geometry of an illumination dome; An adaptive method for finding surface normals by bounded regression; Generating 3D surfaces from photometric stereo; Relationship between surface normals and specular angles; Modelling surface specularity by a modified Lorentzian function; Determining the optimal wavelengths of colour laser scanners; Characterising colour devices by synthetic reflectance spectra