Multispectral Pattern Recognition Applied to X-ray Fluorescence Images of the Archimedes Palimpsest

摘要

The Archimedes Palimpsest is one of the most significant texts in the history of science. Much of the text has been read using images of reflected visible light and visible light produced by ultraviolet fluorescence. However, these techniques do not perform well on the four pages of the manuscript that are obscured by forged icons that were painted over these pages during the first half of the 20th century. X-ray fluorescence images of one of these pages have been processed using spectral pattern recognition techniques developed for environmental remote sensing to recover the original texts beneath the paint.