Our colleagues at UCL, Kazim Pal and Tim Weyrich, in collaboration with Olga Sorkine-Hornung’s group at ETH Zurich, have put together this video to present the ground-breaking interactive method they have developed to digitally restore severely damaged historical parchments based on their work on the Great Parchment Book. The response of those here at LMA was “Wow!” both when we first watched the video and on subsequent viewings.

You can see the amazing results of the method when applied to the Great Parchment Book in the sample of new and improved enhanced images we have uploaded for folios A1r, B18r, H4r, K3r, N2r, N3r and Q1r. Here are the images for K3r as an example with the original image on the left and new, improved flattened image on the right.

It will take us some time to digitally flatten and upload all the improved images using the method developed by UCL: we’ll keep you posted about progress.

If you want to know more about how they did it, Kazim Pal, Christian Schüller, Daniele Panozzo, Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Tim Weyrich have published the method in an academic paper entitiled “Content-Aware Surface Parameterization for Interactive Restoration of Historical Documents” which will appear in Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. Eurographics), 33(2), 9 pages, 2014.

 Wow!