Recognizing Degraded Handwritten Characters

In this paper, Slavonic manuscripts from the 11th century written in Glagolitic script are investigated. State-of-the-art optical character recognition methods produce poor results for degraded handwritten document images. This is largely due to a lack of suitable results from basic pre-processing steps such as binarization and image segmentation. Therefore, a new, binarization-free approach will be presented that is independent of pre-processing deficiencies. It additionally incorporates local information in order to recognize also fragmented or faded characters. The proposed algorithm consists of two steps: character classification and character localization. Firstly scale invariant feature transform features are extracted and classified using support vector machines. On this basis interest points are clustered according to their spatial information. Then, characters are localized and eventually recognized by a weighted voting scheme of pre-classified local descriptors. Preliminary results show that the proposed system can handle highly degraded manuscript images with background noise, e.g. stains, tears, and faded characters

Readability Enhancement and Palimpsest Decipherment of Historical Manuscripts

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

Exploring Medieval Manuscripts Writer Predictability: A Study on Scribe and Letter Identification

Handwriting communication is a long-established human activity that has survived into the 21st century. Accordingly, research interest in handwritten documents, both historical and modern, is significant. The way we write has changed significantly over the past few centuries. For example, texts of the Middle Ages were often written and copied by anonymous scribes. The writing of each scribe, known as his/her "scribal hand" is unique. It can be differentiated using a variety of consciously and unconsciously produced features. Distinguishing between these different scribal hands is a central focus of the humanities research field known as "paleography." Character recognition within each scribal hand has also posed an interesting challenge. Some issues make these digital processes difficult, such as paper degradation and the soiling of the manuscript page. Thus, in this paper, we propose an investigation in both perspectives, character recognition and writer identification, in medieval manuscripts to better understand the specific behaviour of two 800-year-old scribes based on their manuscripts in comparison with a modern calligrapher. The experiments demonstrated that degradation and tremor can influence the analysis of medieval handwriting documents. However, the results presented an efficient accuracy with a better accuracy rate in letter classification than in writer identification

Kodikologie und Paläographie im digitalen Zeitalter 3 / Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age 3

Die zunehmende Verfügbarkeit digitaler Reproduktionen, eine qualitative Verbesserung von Reproduktionstechniken und die Entwicklung neuer Verfahren zur Analyse von Schrift und Beschreibstoffen in den vergangenen Jahren hat in die Zuwendung der historisch orientierten Geisteswissenschaften zur Materialität der schriftlichen Überlieferung gefördert. Anknüpfend an die vorangegangenen Bände der Reihe präsentiert dieser Band aktuelle computergestützte Forschungen zu schriftlichem Kulturgut. Der thematische Rahmen reicht dabei von der Vorstellung neuer Reproduktionstechniken über die Anwendung von Bildmanipulationen zur Lesbarmachung schwer entzifferbarer Manuskripte und lexikostatistische Untersuchungen bis hin zur Vorstellung von Materialdatenbanken zu Beschreibstoffen. Inhalt: Oliver Duntze: Einleitung (IX) Tal Hassner, Malte Rehbein, Peter A. Stokes, Lior Wolf: Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits (1) Digitale Reproduktion als paläographischesWerkzeug / Digital imaging as a palaeographic tool Fabian Hollaus, Melanie Gau, Robert Sablatnig, William A. Christens-Barry, Heinz Miklas: Readability Enhancement and Palimpsest Decipherment of Historical Manuscripts (31) Christine Voth: What lies beneath: The application of digital technology to uncover writing obscured by a chemical reagent (47) Verwaltung von Erschließungsdaten / Organizing descriptive information Rombert Stapel: The development of a medieval scribe (67) Matthieu Bonicel, Dominique Stutzmann: Une application iPad pour l’annotation collaborative des manuscrits médiévaux avec le protocole SharedCanvas: «Formes à toucher» (87) Erwin Frauenknecht, Maria Stieglecker: WZIS – Wasserzeichen-Informationssystem: Verwaltung und Präsentation von Wasserzeichen und ihrer Metadaten (105) Elisa Pallottini: Un corpus di iscrizioni medievali della provincia di Viterbo: Metodologia d’analisi e alcune riflessioni sulla sua informatizzazione (123) Appendices Kurzbiographien – Biographical Notes (137

Kodikologie und Paläographie im digitalen Zeitalter 2 - Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age 2

Der Einsatz digitaler Technik verändert den wissenschaftlichen Umgang mit der handgeschriebenen Überlieferung. Dieser Band vertieft Fragen zu Digitalisierung und Katalogisierung, zu automatischer Schrifterkennung und Schriftanalyse, und er erweitert eine Diskussion, die mit dem im letzten Jahr erschienenen ersten Band zur digitalen Handschriftenforschung angestossen worden ist: Welche Erkenntnisse können etwa naturwissenschaftliche Methoden liefern? Welche musik- und kunsthistorischen Fragestellungen lassen sich mit Hilfe moderner Informationstechnologien beantworten? Wie lassen sich Methoden einer digitalen Auswertung lateinischer Handschriften auf griechische, glagolithische oder ägyptische Texte anwenden? Der raum-zeitliche Rahmen der hier von einer internationalen Autorenschaft zusammengetragenen 22 wissenschaftlichen Beiträge reicht vom alten Ägypten bis ins Paris der Postmoderne. Mit Beiträgen von: Pádraig Ó Macháin; Armand Tif; Alison Stones, Ken Sochats; Melissa Terras; Silke Schöttle, Ulrike Mehringer; Marilena Maniaci, Paolo Eleuteri; Ezio Ornato; Toby Burrows; Robert Kummer; Lior Wolf, Nachum Dershowitz, Liza Potikha, Tanya German, Roni Shweka, Yacov Choueka; Daniel Deckers, Leif Glaser; Timothy Stinson; Peter Meinlschmidt, Carmen Kämmerer, Volker Märgner; Peter Stokes—Dominique Stutzmann; Stephen Quirke; Markus Diem, Robert Sablatnig, Melanie Gau, Heinz Miklas; Julia Craig-McFeely; Isabelle Schürch, Martin Rüesch; Carole Dornier, Pierre-Yves Buard; Samantha Saidi, Jean-François Bert, Philippe Artières; Elena Pierazzo, Peter Stokes. Einleitung von: Franz Fischer, Patrick Sahle. Unter Mitarbeit von: Bernhard Assmann, Malte Rehbein, Patrick Sahle

Scriptinformatics

Scripts (writing systems) usually belong to specific languages and have temporal, spatial and cultural characteristics. The evolution of scripts has been the subject of research for a long time. This is probably because the long-term development of human thinking is reflected in the surviving script relics, many of which are still undeciphered today. The book presents the study of the script evolution with the mathematical tools of systematics, phylogenetics and bioinformatics. In the research described, the script is the evolutionary taxonomic unit (taxon), which is analogous to the concept of biological species. Among the methods of phylogenetics, phenetics classifies the investigated taxa on the basis of their morphological similarity, and does not primarily examine genealogical relationships. Due to the scarcity of morphological diversity of scripts’ features, random coincidences of evolution-independent features are much more common in scripts than in biological species, thus phenetic modelling based solely on morphological features can lead to erroneous results. For this reason, phenetic modeling has been extended with evolutionary considerations, thereby allowing the modelling uncertainties observed in the script evolution to be addressed due to the large number of random coincidences (homoplasies) characterizing each script. The book describes an extended phenetic method developed to investigate the script evolution. This data-driven approach helps to reduce the impact of the uncertainties inherent in the phenetic model due to the large number of homoplasies that occur during the evolution of scripts. The elaborated phenetic and evolutionary analyses were applied to the Rovash scripts used on the Eurasian Steppe (Grassland), including the Turkic Rovash (Turkic Runic/runiform) and the Székely-Hungarian Rovash. The evaluation of the extended phenetic model of the scripts, the various phenograms, the script spectra and the group spectra helped to reconstruct the main ancestors and evolutionary stages of the investigated scripts

TECHNART 2017. Non-destructive and microanalytical techniques in art and cultural heritage. Book of abstracts

440 p.TECHNART2017 is the international biannual congress on the application of Analytical Techniques in Art and Cultural Heritage. The aim of this European conference is to provide a scientific forum to present and promote the use of analytical spectroscopic techniques in cultural heritage on a worldwide scale to stimulate contacts and exchange experiences, making a bridge between science and art. This conference builds on the momentum of the previous TECHNART editions of Lisbon, Athens, Berlin, Amsterdam and Catania, offering an outstanding and unique opportunity for exchanging knowledge on leading edge developments. Cultural heritage studies are interpreted in a broad sense, including pigments, stones, metal, glass, ceramics, chemometrics on artwork studies, resins, fibers, forensic applications in art, history, archaeology and conservation science. The meeting is focused in different aspects: - X-ray analysis (XRF, PIXE, XRD, SEM-EDX). - Confocal X-ray microscopy (3D Micro-XRF, 3D Micro-PIXE). - Synchrotron, ion beam and neutron based techniques/instrumentation. - FT-IR and Raman spectroscopy. - UV-Vis and NIR absorption/reflectance and fluorescence. - Laser-based analytical techniques (LIBS, etc.). - Magnetic resonance techniques. - Chromatography (GC, HPLC) and mass spectrometry. - Optical imaging and coherence techniques. - Mobile spectrometry and remote sensing

Historični seminar 14

The volume Historični seminar 14 ('Historical Seminar 14'), issued in the time of transformed reality of what we knew and took for granted, draws attention to the fact that the image we cultivate of ourselves and our history may sometimes be too simplified to be entirely real. At first, the volume both revises already known chapters of Church history and introduces hitherto unknown ones. Simon Malmenvall’s analysis of the characters of the noble martyrs Boris and Gleb, Jovan Vladimir, and Magnus Erlendsson shows how the stories of their martyrdom had a nation-building function. Celeste McNamara’s article on Giovanni Barbarigo introduces the unusual and less well-known topic of seventeenth-century missions. Monika Deželak Trojar analyzes in detail Johann Ludwig Schönleben’s German and Latin Lenten sermons. Aleš Maver’s article discusses why Latin disappeared so quickly from Slovenian churches after the Second Vatican Council. On the other hand, the pre-modern religious practices of nature worshippers in Slovenia are discussed by Cirila Toplak. Modern times and also more political issues are examined by Tomaž Ivešić who focuses on the increase in ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia in the early 1970s, while Aleksandar Takovski traces the historical representation of heroic figures in four former Yugoslav countries.Historični seminar 14 prihaja v nenavadnem času, ko se svet spreminja pred našimi očmi. Da bi bolje razumeli sedanjost, je treba (na novo) ovrednotiti tudi preteklost in sedem zanimivih člankov domačih in tujih raziskovalcev, ki so bili najprej predstavljeni v ciklu predavanj Historični seminar na ZRC SAZU, zgodovino prikazuje v novi luči. Simon Malmenvall je analiziral like vladarskih mučencev Borisa in Gleba, Jovana Vladimirja in Magnusa Erlendssona, Celeste McNamara pa je pisala o padovanskem škofu Giovanniju Barbarigu in predstavila misijone v 17. stoletju. Monika Deželak Trojar je analizirala nemške in latinske postne pridige Janeza Ludvika Schönlebna in pokazala kakšen spreten govornik je bil. Aleš Maver je na slikovit način predstavil razloge, zakaj se je latinščina po 2. vatikanskem cerkvenem zboru tako hitro izgubila iz slovenskih cerkva. Cirila Toplak se je posvetila naravovercem, zanimivi marginalni skupnosti na območju zahodne Slovenije, ki izkazuje predkrščanske in predmoderne kulturne prvine. Tomaž Ivešić je pisal o zaostrovanju nacionalnega vprašanja v Jugoslaviji v začetku sedemdesetih let, Aleksander Takovski pa o arhetipskih junakih in zlobnežih v Sloveniji, Hrvaški, Makedoniji in Srbiji