The Ghost in the Manuscript: Hyperspectral Text Recovery and Segmentation

Major activities in palaeographic and manuscript studies include the recovery of illegible or deleted text, the minute analyses of scribal hands, the identification of inks, and the segmentation and dating of text. This article describes how Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) can be used to perform quality text recovery, segmentation and dating of historical documents. It provides a comprehensive overview of HSI, and associated computational and segmentation techniques used for two experimental investigations: (i) a 16th century pastedown cover, and (ii) a multi-ink example typical of that found in, for example, late medieval administrative texts such as Gottingen's kundige bok.