Browsing through Closed Books: Fully Automatic Book Page Extraction from a 3-D X-Ray CT Volume

When digitizing or investigating historical documents, it is often the case that a document can not be opened, page-turned or touched anymore. Damages such as moisture or fire and aging processes disallow browsing through a book. To address these particular cases, our earlier work showed that Micro-CT X-ray scanners are able to image documents written with iron gall ink. A self-made book consisting of ten hand written pages was scanned and investigated without opening or page-turning. However, when analyzing the reconstruction results, we faced the problem of a proper automatic page segmentation and 2-D mapping within the volume in an acceptable time without losing information of the writings. The main problem is that the pages can be arbitrary deformed or squeezed together. In this paper, we present a fully automatic algorithm for the segmentation and extraction of book pages from the original 3-D volume. Our method delivers high quality results for our book model and can be easily adapted to other imaging modalities. We show that it performs well even for an extreme case with low resolution input data and wavy pages. To keep it simple for users, our algorithm works without any need of prior information or user interactions.