Digitization of Ancient Manuscripts and Inscriptions - A Review

The article describes the most recent developments in the field of enhancement and digitization of ancient manuscripts and inscriptions. Digitization of ancient sources of information is essential to have an insight of the rich culture of previous civilizations, which in turn requires the high rate of accuracy in word and character recognition. To enhance the accuracy of the Optical Character Recognition system, the degraded images need to be made compatible for the OCR system. So, the image has to be pre-processed by filtering techniques and segmented by thresholding methods followed by post processing operations. The need for digitization of ancient artefacts is to preserve information that lies in the ancient manuscripts and improve the tourism of our country by attracting more and more tourists. This article gives an analysis of the different methods used for the enhancement of degraded ancient images in terms of low resolution, minimal intensity difference between the text and background, show through effects and uneven background. The techniques reviewed include ICA, NGFICA, Cumulants Based ICA and a novel thresholding technique for text extraction.