Integrating Copies Obtained from Old and New Preservation Efforts

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the Qumran area and elsewhere in the Judean desert beginning in 1947 and were photographed in infrared in the 1950s. Recently, the Israel Antiquities Authority embarked on an ambitious project to digitize all the fragments using multi-spectral cameras. We describe a method that utilizes information from both of these image sets: the highly detailed multispectral images and the older infrared images, which preserve the state of the fragments as it was shortly after discovery. We use a two-step registration procedure to align the image sets. First, a coarse global transformation is applied to the whole image of the new set, producing a rough alignment, followed by a fine, local wrapping based on interest point matching. The aligned images can be used to improve image binarization and to identify and repair fragments that have degraded further over the years. Additionally, the fine alignment parameters can be used for coarse attribute classification, such as the period when written.