3D Reconstruction For Damaged Documents: Imaging of The Great Parchment Book

Abstract

Digitization of historical documents is extremely useful as it allows easy access to the documents from remote locations and removes the need for potentially harmful physical handling. Traditional imaging methods are unsuitable for documents with complex geometry as they will produce images containing perspective distortions, and 3D imaging methods previously proposed for document scanning will often suffer from occlusions and/or require manual alignment of individual range scans. We present a lightweight pipeline for imaging and generating 3D reconstructions of severely damaged and distorted documents which exhibit such complex geometry. We demonstrate our pipeline on The Great Parchment Book of The Honourable The Irish Society, a 17th century survey of the Ulster estates managed by the City of London, which was severely damaged by a fire in 1786.

Citation Style:    Display Alpha ACM SIGGRAPH IEEEtran Publication

3D Reconstruction For Damaged Documents: Imaging of The Great Parchment Book. Kazim Pal, Melissa Terras, Tim Weyrich. In Proc. of 2nd Intl. Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing, pp. 14–21, Washington DC, 24 August, 2013. Selected for oral presentation.Kazim Pal, Melissa Terras, and Tim Weyrich. 3D reconstruction for damaged documents: Imaging of The Great Parchment Book. In Proc. of 2nd International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing, pages 14–21, August 2013. Selected for oral presentation.Pal, K., Terras, M., and Weyrich, T. 2013. 3D reconstruction for damaged documents: Imaging of The Great Parchment Book. In Proc. of 2nd International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing, 14–21. Selected for oral presentation.K. Pal, M. Terras, and T. Weyrich, “3D reconstruction for damaged documents: Imaging of The Great Parchment Book,” in Proc. of 2nd International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing, Aug. 2013, pp. 14–21, selected for oral presentation. PDF (13 MB) BibTeX Project Page (with source code)

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the UCL EngD VEIV Centre for Doctoral Training and by London Metropolitan Archives, who we would like to thank for access to the Great Parchment Book. We would specifically like to thank Caroline De Stefani for helping schedule access to the document, and Alberto Campagnolo for supervising the entire imaging process.