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From Invisibility to Readability: Recovering the Ink of Herculaneum Clifford Seth Parker University of Kentucky, [email protected]

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From Invisibility to Readability: Recovering the Ink of Herculaneum Clifford Seth Parker University of Kentucky, C.Seth.Parker@Uky.Edu University of Kentucky UKnowledge Computer Science Faculty Publications Computer Science 5-8-2019 From Invisibility to Readability: Recovering the Ink of Herculaneum Clifford Seth Parker University of Kentucky, [email protected] Stephen Parsons University of Kentucky, [email protected] Jack Bandy University of Kentucky Christy Chapman University of Kentucky, [email protected] Frederik Coppens Bruker Micro-CT, Belgium See next page for additional authors Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits oy u. Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cs_facpub Part of the Computer Sciences Commons Repository Citation Parker, Clifford Seth; Parsons, Stephen; Bandy, Jack; Chapman, Christy; Coppens, Frederik; and Seales, William Brent, "From Invisibility to Readability: Recovering the Ink of Herculaneum" (2019). Computer Science Faculty Publications. 23. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cs_facpub/23 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Computer Science at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in Computer Science Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Authors Clifford Seth Parker, Stephen Parsons, Jack Bandy, Christy Chapman, Frederik Coppens, and William Brent Seales From Invisibility to Readability: Recovering the Ink of Herculaneum Notes/Citation Information Published in PLOS One, v. 14, no. 5, p. 1-17. © 2019 Parker et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Digital Object Identifier (DOI) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0215775 This article is available at UKnowledge: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cs_facpub/23 RESEARCH ARTICLE From invisibility to readability: Recovering the ink of Herculaneum 1 1 1 1 Clifford Seth ParkerID *, Stephen ParsonsID , Jack Bandy , Christy Chapman , Frederik Coppens2, William Brent Seales1 1 Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, United States of America, 2 Bruker Micro-CT, Kontich, Belgium * [email protected] a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 Abstract a1111111111 a1111111111 The noninvasive digital restoration of ancient texts written in carbon black ink and hidden inside artifacts has proven elusive, even with advanced imaging techniques like x-ray-based micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). This paper identifies a crucial mistaken assump- tion: that micro-CT data fails to capture any information representing the presence of carbon ink. Instead, we show new experiments indicating a subtle but detectable signature from OPEN ACCESS carbon ink in micro-CT. We demonstrate a new computational approach that captures, Citation: Parker CS, Parsons S, Bandy J, Chapman enhances, and makes visible the characteristic signature created by carbon ink in micro-CT. C, Coppens F, Seales WB (2019) From invisibility to readability: Recovering the ink of Herculaneum. This previously ªunseenº evidence of carbon inks, which can now successfully be made visi- PLoS ONE 14(5): e0215775. https://doi.org/ ble, is a discovery that can lead directly to the noninvasive digital recovery of the lost texts of 10.1371/journal.pone.0215775 Herculaneum. Editor: Paweø Pøawiak, Politechnika Krakowska im Tadeusza Kosciuszki, POLAND Received: February 1, 2019 Accepted: April 8, 2019 Introduction Published: May 8, 2019 While written language emerged just 5,000 years ago [1], the vast majority of manuscripts Copyright: © 2019 Parker et al. This is an open available for study and analysis are only about half this age, with many primary editions having access article distributed under the terms of the been lost to the turbulence of the ancient era or the deleterious passage of time. Damage and Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and decay, dual realities of the physical world, are constantly at work to rob us of humanity's writ- reproduction in any medium, provided the original ten record. Today, our only glimpse of many of our most important texts is through secondary author and source are credited. witnesses, painstakingly preserved by medieval scholars, but now teetering on the verge of Data Availability Statement: The supporting oblivion. datasets for our manuscript are hosted by OSF.io In the past, no feasible way to overcome this damage existed. Today, however, noninvasive and are available at this DOI: https://doi.org/10. advanced imaging techniques provide a viable solution. In 2015, we used micro-computed 17605/OSF.IO/ZDKN4 The GitHub repository tomography (micro-CT) coupled with specialized analysis softwareÐa process we term ªvir- hosting our code is available at this URL: https:// tual unwrappingºÐto image and digitally recover a burned Hebrew scroll so fragile that tradi- github.com/viscenter/ink-id. tional restoration methods were not attempted [2]. For the first time ever, a complete text was Funding: W.B.S. acknowledges funding from the digitally retrieved and recreated from inside an object so severely damaged that it would never National Science Foundation (award IIS-1422039), be physically opened. Google, Lee and Stacie Marksbury, and John and Karen Maxwell. Funders did not have any role in This technical breakthrough in the restoration of friable manuscripts forged a pathway for the study design, data collection and analysis, reading the most iconic and inaccessible of irreparably damaged materials: the lost texts of decision to publish, or preparation of the Herculaneum. Buried and carbonized in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, this cache PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0215775 May 8, 2019 1 / 17 Non-invasive recovery of carbon ink from badly damaged manuscripts manuscript. The authors acknowledge a of more than 1,800 papyrus rolls was found in a luxurious Roman home believed to belong to commercial affiliation with Bruker Micro-CT. The the family of Julius Caesar's father-in-law [3]. The collection represents the only large-scale funder provided support in the form of salaries for library to have survived from Greco-Roman antiquity and the only classical one to have been author F.C. but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, found in situ. While any successful recovery of humanity's collective textual record stands decision to publish, or preparation of the to impact the literary and historical canon, the materials from Herculaneum are especially manuscript. The specific role of this author is intriguing to scholars [4]. articulated in the `author contributions' section. Unfortunately, the Herculaneum papyri represent a perfect storm of challenges for the vir- Competing interests: Bruker micro-CT provided tual unwrapping process. They are massively damaged, extremely fragile, and written in a car- support in the form of salaries for author FC. This bon ink known as ªlamp black.º While micro-CT overcomes concerns regarding fragility and does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies the threat of additional damage due to physical handling, it also constrains the restoration pro- on sharing data and materials. Author WBS cess, particularly with regards to ink detection. Conventional wisdom claims that ªwhat you received funding from Google in the form of an see is what you getº in micro-CT. If text doesn't readily appear when the raw data is analyzed unrestricted research grant. This affiliation does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on and rendered as a viewable image, then the ink signal must be absent from the data. Such sharing data and materials. thinking has led to the belief that carbon inks, such as the lamp black of the Herculaneum scrolls, are completely ªinvisibleº to regular micro-CT imaging [5]. In this paper, we refute those claims and conclusively demonstrate the detectability of car- bon inks in micro-CT. Previous attempts to render carbon-inked text from micro-CT relied upon a single characteristic of the manuscript to detect the ink: the presence of a relative den- sity difference between the ink and the writing substrate. We show, however, that inked writ- ing substrates demonstrate other characteristic signals that enable the detection of carbon ink in the absence of relative density differences. Using our knowledge of these characteristics, we construct a machine learning (ML) pipe- line, built upon a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3DCNN), that detects carbon ink in micro-CT data. Our approach does not depend upon the presence of any particular ink char- acteristic, but rather constructs a general model of the ink's signal from the micro-CT data. We also construct a modification of this pipeline that generates photorealistic renderings of the inked papyrus surface. Finally, we apply both ML pipelines to authentic Herculaneum mate- rial, opening the path forward for reading the entirety of the hidden layers and folds of the Herculaneum papyri. Related work Technological progress toward the noninvasive recovery of text from inside damaged manu- scripts has occurred rapidly in recent years. The first micro-CT scans of Herculaneum scrolls were performed in 2009, revealing a complex internal structure but an incomplete under- standing of the ink signal [6]. Seales et al. proposed the use of phase contrast micro-CT
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