Character Recognition Advancement to Support Translation of the

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a tenth century manuscript that contains the earliest known copies of the treatises of Archimedes, two of which were previously undiscovered. In the twelfth century, the mathematical text was overwritten by a prayer book, the Euchologion, and it has since been severely damaged by mold and fire. Several multispectral imaging techniques have been applied to high-resolution images of the palimpsest to provide scholars of ancient Greek mathematics with visible text for inquiry. In the spring of 2004, it was estimated that nearly twenty percent of the Archimedes text still needed to be translated. A recently developed character recognition software tool was submitted for evaluation by members of the Archimedes Palimpsest project. The preliminary system was decidedly beneficial to the translation efforts, and future advancements and research are suggested. Some of the potential improvements include modification of training data collection, expansion of the composite filter library for feature extraction, and incorporation of other promising character reconstruction techniques into the existing software.