Interactive Exploration and Flattening of Deformed Historical Documents

Abstract

We present an interactive application for browsing severely damaged documents and other cultural artefacts. Such documents often contain strong geometric distortions such as wrinkling, buckling, and shrinking and cannot be flattened physically due to the high risk of causing further damage. Previous methods for virtual restoration involve globally flattening a 3D reconstruction of the document to produce a static image. We show how this global approach can fail in cases of severe geometric distortion, and instead propose an interactive viewer which allows a user to browse a document while dynamically flattening only the local region under inspection. Our application also records the provenance of the reconstruction by displaying the reconstruction side by side with the original image data.