Unveiling the invisible - mathematical methods for restoring and interpreting illuminated manuscripts

TL;DR

This paper reviews mathematical techniques for restoring and visualizing illuminated manuscripts, highlighting their potential to digitally manipulate and interpret valuable art objects while emphasizing the importance of digital methods in the arts.

Contribution

It introduces mathematical methods specifically tailored for digital restoration and visualization of illuminated manuscripts, bridging a gap between technical image processing and art preservation.

Findings

Mathematical methods enable digital restoration of illuminated manuscripts.

Digital visualization offers new insights into historical artworks.

The approach provides an objective toolkit for arts preservation.

Abstract

The last fifty years have seen an impressive development of mathematical methods for the analysis and processing of digital images, mostly in the context of photography, biomedical imaging and various forms of engineering. The arts have been mostly overlooked in this process, apart from a few exceptional works in the last ten years. With the rapid emergence of digitisation in the arts, however, the arts domain is becoming increasingly receptive to digital image processing methods and the importance of paying attention to this therefore increases. In this paper we discuss a range of mathematical methods for digital image restoration and digital visualisation for illuminated manuscripts. The latter provide an interesting opportunity for digital manipulation because they traditionally remain physically untouched. At the same time they also serve as an example for the possibilities mathematics and digital restoration offer as a generic and objective toolkit for the arts.