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Publication
Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
We present a fundamental development step of a new technique to read and digitize ancient handwritten documents. Chemical analysis by x-ray fluorescence and x-ray tomography enabled us to decipher words and drawings from inside a closed, 200-pages 18 th century handwritten book. The ink chemistry is essential: tomographic reading is feasible thanks to the iron present in ancient inks (iron gall) over one millennium – whereas carbon or organic inks do not provide sufficient x-ray contrast. The results presented are a key progress towards the ultimate goal of the technique: non-invasive reading of fragile and/or unopenable documents.