III: Small: Virtual Unrolling of Carbonized Herculaneum Scrolls

该项目将开发算法和软件工具，用于从卷轴的体积，非破坏性扫描中提取书面文本，这些卷轴在公元79年维苏威火山爆发后在赫库兰尼姆的纸莎草别墅中被炭化。赫库兰尼姆图书馆于1752年首次被发现，引起了全世界学者的极大兴趣。出土的藏书中有1800多张炭化的莎草纸卷轴，是已知的唯一从古典时代保存下来的图书馆。所有物理打开卷轴的尝试都造成了严重的破坏，许多卷轴（近300个）仍然完好无损。该项目将建立一个计算框架，以“数字展开”两个完整的卷轴，为技术挑战提供一个全面的、非侵入性的解决方案，并为赫库兰尼姆收藏中所有难以访问的文本的学术集会和出版规定一条路径。这将明确地证明，体积、非破坏性成像方法可以揭示长期以来被认为丢失的完整文本。该项目中开发的算法将为跨学科发现古代新作品奠定基础，将这些方法和算法扩展到完整的赫库兰尼姆收藏中，并对文化遗产的体积分析产生更广泛的兴趣。赫库兰尼姆古卷是用碳基墨水书写的，这给体积测量方法带来了挑战，因为密度变化非常小。这项工作将克服这个问题，使用同步加速器光束的相衬断层扫描，以建立高分辨率的体积模型，在墨水边界显示更好的对比度。由于赫库兰尼姆辊的内部结构是复杂、混沌和全三维的，当表面变成主要的切片方向时，基于切片的分割策略将失败。相反，分割方法将基于注册的多模态扫描和3D结构张量方法，用于从局部多尺度体积算子和区域增长方法构建表面估计。估计的纸莎草表面分割将使用优化方法在局部重新定位，以改善预期的表面纹理，然后进行数字平坦化，以产生清晰，平坦的卷轴内部表面视图。这项工作将扩展体成像向更广泛使用的表示平台，并将解决分割、配准、表示和可视化方面的基本技术挑战。该项目将把开发的分割和展开算法作为软件工具实施，以便非科学家能够直接从卷轴的体积数据集中提取新的文本图像。欲了解更多信息，请访问项目网站http://vis.uky.edu。

This project will develop algorithms and software tools for extracting the written text from volumetric, non-destructive scans of scrolls, which were carbonized in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum as a result of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. The library from Herculaneum, which was first discovered in 1752, is of immense interest to scholars worldwide. The excavated collection contains more than 1800 carbonized papyrus scrolls, and is the only library known to have survived from classical antiquity. All attempts at physically opening the scrolls have created profound damage, and many scrolls (nearly 300) are still intact. This project will build a computational framework in order to "digitally unroll" two complete scrolls, producing a comprehensive, non-invasive solution to the technical challenges and prescribing a path for the scholarly assembly and publication of all inaccessible texts in the Herculaneum collection. This will definitively establish that volumetric, non-destructive imaging methods can reveal complete texts that were long thought lost. The algorithms developed in this project will set the stage for the interdisciplinary discovery of new works from antiquity, the scaling of these methods and algorithms to the complete Herculaneum collection, and the broader interest in volumetric analysis for cultural heritage.The Herculaneum scrolls were written with carbon-based inks that create a challenging scenario for volumetric methods because density variations are very small. This work will overcome that problem using phase contrast tomography from a synchrotron beam in order to build high resolution volumetric models that show better contrast at ink boundaries. Because the internal structure of the Herculaneum rolls is complex, chaotic, and fully 3D, slice-based segmentation strategies fail when the surfaces turn into the dominant slice directions. Instead the segmentation approach will be based on registered multi-modal scans and a 3D structure tensor approach for building surface estimates from local multiscale volumetric operators and region-growing methods. The estimated papyrus surface segmentation will be locally re-positioned using optimization methods that improve the expected surface texture, and then digitally flattened to produce clear, flat views of the internal surfaces of the scrolls. This work will expand volumetric imaging toward a more widely used representational platform and will address fundamental technical challenges in segmentation, registration, representation, and visualization. The project will implement the developed segmentation and unwrapping algorithms as software tools so that non-scientists will be enabled to extract new images of text directly from volumetric data sets of scrolls. For further information, see the project website at http://vis.uky.edu.