Multi-Spectral Image Acquisition and Registration of Ancient Manuscripts

A multi-spectral image acquisition system and a fully automatic image registration of ancient manuscripts are presented in this paper. Parchment sometimes contains two scripts, whereas the first script was erased. Multi-spectral imaging enhances the erased script and makes it visible to the human eye respectively. In this paper an image acquisition system is presented, that records UV reflectography as well as UV fluorescence images. Since the images, taken in varying spectral bands, are not aligned to each other, they have to be registered in order to be combined. The similarity of both images is computed by means of the normalized cross correlation, which is an area-based method. Afterwards the correlated images are aligned with each other, using the local weighted mean method. This paper contains images of manuscripts by which the registration process was tested.