Dose Reduction for Historical Books Digitization by 3-D X-Ray CT

Corruptions such as aging-processes or moisture make it often impossible to digitize historical books or scrolls with common digitization approaches. 3-D X-ray CT is a non-destructive method which can provide a look inside those documents. Current CT scans use a full-circle trajectory with a large number of projections and high exposure times. However, there are historical goods that may suffer from high radiation dose. In this work, we present an evaluation of a 3-D X-ray CT scan with three reduced projection sizes reconstructed with four common algorithms compared to the mentioned high dose approach. For our experiments, we used a book with 22 pages and a leather cover. Every page has writings made with iron gall ink. We show that we can reduce the number of projections by at least 85 and up to 92.5 percent without severe loss of information on the book’s writings. The reconstructed volumes are compared with regard to common similarity measures as well as visual outputs of a selected 2-D mapped page.

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