Enhancing the Readability of Palimpsests Using Generative Image Inpainting

Mahdi Jampour, Hussein Mohammed, Jost Gippert

2024

Abstract

Palimpsests are manuscripts that have been scraped or washed for reuse, usually as another document. Recovering the undertext of these manuscripts can be of significant interest to scholars in the humanities. Multispectral imaging is a technique often used to make the undertext visible in palimpsests. Nevertheless, this approach is not sufficient in many cases, due to the fact that the undertext in resulting images is still covered by the overtext or other artefacts. Therefore, we propose defining this issue as an inpainting problem and enhancing the readability of the undertext using generative image inpainting. To this end, we introduce a novel method for generating synthetic multispectral palimpsest images and make the generated dataset publicly available. Furthermore, we utilise this dataset in the fine-tuning of a generative inpainting approach to enhance the readability of palimpsest undertext. The evaluation of our approach is provided for both the synthetic dataset and palimpsests from actual research in the humanities. The evaluation results indicate the effectiveness of our method in terms of both quantitative and qualitative measures.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Jampour M., Mohammed H. and Gippert J. (2024). Enhancing the Readability of Palimpsests Using Generative Image Inpainting. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM; ISBN 978-989-758-684-2, SciTePress, pages 687-694. DOI: 10.5220/0012347100003654

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icpram24,
author={Mahdi Jampour and Hussein Mohammed and Jost Gippert},
title={Enhancing the Readability of Palimpsests Using Generative Image Inpainting},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM},
year={2024},
pages={687-694},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0012347100003654},
isbn={978-989-758-684-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM
TI - Enhancing the Readability of Palimpsests Using Generative Image Inpainting
SN - 978-989-758-684-2
AU - Jampour M.
AU - Mohammed H.
AU - Gippert J.
PY - 2024
SP - 687
EP - 694
DO - 10.5220/0012347100003654
PB - SciTePress