Computer Aided Restoration of Handwritten Character Strokes
This addresses the challenge of preserving and interpreting historical documents for archaeologists and historians, though it is incremental as it builds on variational and spline methods.
The paper tackles the problem of restoring incomplete handwritten characters in noisy ancient documents by modeling strokes as pen movements with varying radius and using cubic spline-based gradient descent, achieving plausible results on approximately 1000 ancient Hebrew characters from the 8th-7th century BCE.
This work suggests a new variational approach to the task of computer aided restoration of incomplete characters, residing in a highly noisy document. We model character strokes as the movement of a pen with a varying radius. Following this model, a cubic spline representation is being utilized to perform gradient descent steps, while maintaining interpolation at some initial (manually sampled) points. The proposed algorithm was utilized in the process of restoring approximately 1000 ancient Hebrew characters (dating to ca. 8th-7th century BCE), some of which are presented herein and show that the algorithm yields plausible results when applied on deteriorated documents.