On Tuesday 30 April, Professor Paul Rosin from the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University will be giving a public talk on the virtual unrolling of historical scrolls, using X-ray tomographic scans to reveal the contents of the fragile scrolls.
The talk will take place in Room 19 (Block A, Level 1) at the Faculty of ICT, between 16:00 and 17:30.
For further details contact Dr Alexandra Bonnici.
Abstract
Historical parchment scrolls are fragile, and consequently, many such scrolls cannot be unrolled, so that their contents have remained hidden for centuries. I will describe several stages in the development of our method to perform a 'virtual unrolling' of such documents from their X-ray tomographic scans. A critical element is the segmentation of the images in order to separate the parchment from the background, which is complicated by both holes in the parchment and the fusing of adjacent rolled layers. Since this causes standard segmentation algorithms to produce errors, we have devised several new algorithms to cope with such data. Once segmentation is achieved, the parchment is virtually flattened, and the ink density recovered to produce a reconstruction of the parchment surface. Examples of our results are shown on several historic scrolls.
Paul Rosin is Professor at the School of Computer Science & Informatics, Cardiff University. Previous posts include lecturer at the Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University London, UK, a research scientist at the Institute for Remote Sensing Applications, Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy, and lecturer at the Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia.
Abstract
Historical parchment scrolls are fragile, and consequently, many such scrolls cannot be unrolled, so that their contents have remained hidden for centuries. I will describe several stages in the development of our method to perform a 'virtual unrolling' of such documents from their X-ray tomographic scans. A critical element is the segmentation of the images in order to separate the parchment from the background, which is complicated by both holes in the parchment and the fusing of adjacent rolled layers. Since this causes standard segmentation algorithms to produce errors, we have devised several new algorithms to cope with such data. Once segmentation is achieved, the parchment is virtually flattened, and the ink density recovered to produce a reconstruction of the parchment surface. Examples of our results are shown on several historic scrolls.
Paul Rosin is Professor at the School of Computer Science & Informatics, Cardiff University. Previous posts include lecturer at the Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University London, UK, a research scientist at the Institute for Remote Sensing Applications, Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy, and lecturer at the Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia.
His research interests are wide and include low-level image processing, performance evaluation, shape analysis, facial analysis, medical image analysis, 3D mesh processing, cellular automata and non-photorealistic rendering. Much of this work has been performed in multidisciplinary collaborations.
In the area of non-photorealistic rendering, he has published many papers over the last decade, and he co-organised the ‘Vision meets Graphics’ workshop in 2015 & 2017, the International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization in 2014 & 2015, and the workshop on Photographic Aesthetics and Non-Photorealistic Rendering in 2013. He was co-editor of the book ‘Image and Video-Based Artistic Stylisation’ published by Springer in 2013.
In the area of 3D object retrieval, in addition to his published papers, he previously co-organised the SHREC competitions for ‘Canonical Forms for Non-Rigid 3D Shape Retrieval’ and ‘Shape Retrieval of Non-Rigid 3D Human Models’, and this year is co-organising the SHREC competition on 'Shape Correspondence with Isometric and Non-Isometric Deformations'.
