Picturing the Past: HP Labs Technology Helping Scholars Decipher Ancient Texts
Yale scholar Walter Bodine had spent the better part of four long years painstakingly transcribing the ancient Sumerian characters inscribed on a crumbling, 4,000-year-old clay tablet. Then he met Tom Malzbender, an HP Labs researcher who has invented a tool that lets scholars see ancient texts in ways never before possible. Malzbender's technology for capturing and viewing images of three-dimensional objects can make characters that were previously invisible or undecipherable clear enough to read. As a result, scholars can derive more accurate meanings from the text - and potentially obtain a better understanding of the past. "I've been working on these texts for years, trying to figure out what the lines say," says Bodine, a research affiliate with the Babylonian Collection at Yale, the nation's premier collection of ancient cuneiform tablets. "This technology gives me access to more data than I get when using my own eyes." In one case, researchers were even able to make out the fingerprint of the author of a document, imprinted ever so faintly into the clay thousands of years ago. "You quite literally have the human touch of 3,000 or 4,000 years ago," says Bruce Zuckerman, director of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California. "Potentially, this (technology) could mean a profound improvement in our knowledge of the ancient world." Traditionally, scholars of ancient texts have scrutinized the physical tablets, stones or other materials to decipher and transcribe inscriptions. Trouble is, the tablets are thousands of years old - they're worn and often crumbling, and the writing is faded. By changing the angle or type of light shining on the tablets, scholars can sometimes see the text more clearly. In the early 1980s, Zuckerman, a scholar and teacher of the Bible and ancient Semitic languages at USC, pioneered the use of high-resolution photographs in the study of ancient writing. Malzbender's invention, a type of image-based relighting, takes that technique several steps further by automating the collection of images and allowing scholars to manipulate the lighting and other aspects of the image on the screen. By changing the appearance of the object, the technology brings out surface details previously invisible to the naked eye. Malzbender and his collegues in HP Labs' visual computing department, Dan Gelb and Hans Wolters, didn't set out to change the study of ancient texts. He was trying to solve problems of existing 3D graphics rendering technologies, looking for a way to both improve photorealism and rendering efficiency. To collect data, Malzbender headed to his basement and built a geodesic dome - constructed of glued-together wooden dowels - that would help him control the angle of light. In a darkened room, he photographed a crumpled-up newspaper 40 times, each time changing the angle of the light, a table lamp. It worked. On the screen, he could manipulate the angle of light to change and enhance the surface appearance of the newspaper...more>>>