Algorithms for contactless scanning of book monuments

Abstract

The article is devoted to the questions of cultural heritage preservation by creating the digital collection of book monuments. The original documents are monuments of book culture and their dilapidated state requires careful handling, splitting of documents for scanning is extremely undesirable. The market does not present the equipment for contactless scanning of books without embroidering, therefore an algorithm that allows digitalizing book monuments in a contactless way has been developed. The technique has been constructed using an algorithm based on the projection of the light grid on the object scanned. The authors propose a sequence of actions consisting of image processing and comparing the results between two images. The first snapshot determines the initial parameters of the grid; the second snapshot determines the actual distortion of the test snapshot. Subsequent mathematical processing allows getting scanned images without absence of geometric distortions of the scanned page due to the system of using the two-dimensional array of corrections. The application of the system has been modeled on the example of «The legend of the destruction of Siberian cities of Tara and Tyumen by the lesser Tatars / / Collection of moral stories, words, lives and other articles [hand.]». The evaluation parameters of the simulation result have been the following: text distinctness, absence of geometric distortions, color quality, uniformity of document scanning quality within a single book, etc., as checked and recognized as high by the experts.The experience described opens possibilities of book monuments digitization using the new algorithm. The development of the system is aimed at expanding the database of objects of material culture to be digitized, perfecting the software, improving the quality of digital images, as well as the capabilities of image recognition and search for the document itself and information it contains.