Multispectral Imaging of the Archimedes Palimpsest

摘要

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a thousand-year-old manuscript. It contains seven treatises of the mathematician, Archimedes, who died in 212 BC. Eight hundred years ago, this manuscript was erased and overwritten with a Christian prayer book. Today, scholars working with the Walters Art Museum of Baltimore, Maryland, want to compare the underlying text of Archimedes with present-day copies of his writings. Two teams of imaging scientists, one from Johns Hopkins University and our team from the Rochester Institute of Technology and Xerox Corporation, have completed a preliminary study of the efficacy of using multispectral imaging and related techniques to recover the faded Archimedes text. In this talk, we report on an image processing method, commonly used in remote sensing, that was used to extract the Archimedes text and suppress the prayer-book writings. The results show that this linear mixing model, using a least squares fit with operator-specified spectral signatures, can separate the underlying Archimedes text from the writings of the prayer book. Although these results are preliminary, they have already begun to reveal new information about the writings of Archimedes.