Making the Invisible Visible

In public and private archives throughout the world there are many historically important documents that have become illegible with the passage of time. The aim of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech is to better define requirements for a system to restore illegible information. Investigator's principal tools are a vidicon camera, and an image processing computer program. This technology originated from the mariner spacecraft. Vidicon camera scans a screen recording different light and shade values which are reproduced as a pattern of dots. Dots are transmitted to a receiver where they are assembled line by line to form a picture like that on a home TV screen. Now computer processor amplifies dots and lines sharpening the image and revealing detail not originally visible.

Full article: http://hdl.handle.net/hdl:2060/20070018877