Segmentation of Parchment Scrolls for Virtual Unrolling

In this paper we introduce a framework for the segmentation of scanned scrolled parchments, based on a novel graph cut based approach with an additional shape prior, in combination with anisotropic diffusion and geometry-constrained postprocessing. This problem has not been investigated by the computer vision community properly yet due to the parchment scanning technology novelty, and is extremely important for effective data recovery from historical scrolled documents whose content is inaccessible due to the deterioration of the parchment. To date, parchment segmentation has required user interaction, which is very time consuming for such data. We demonstrate with real examples how our algorithm is able to solve the major problem for scrolled parchment analysis, namely segment connected layers, and process the data without user interaction.