Non-destructive Digitization of Soiled Historical Chinese Bamboo Scrolls
Daniel Stromer, Vincent Christlein, Andreas Maier, Patrick Zippert, Eric Helmecke, Tino Hausotte, Xiaolin Huang · 2018
For about 2000 years, no paper was used as a media in China but writings and drawings were captured on bamboo and wooden slips. Several slips were bound together with strips and rolled up to a scroll. The writings and drawings were either brushed or even carved into the wood. Those documents are very precious for culture inheritance and research, but due to aging processes, the discovered pieces are sometimes in a poor condition and also soiled. Because cleaning the slips is not only challenging but also writings could be erased, we developed a method to digitize such historical documents without the need of cleaning. We perform a 3-D X-ray micro-CT scan resulting in a 3-D volume of the complete document. With our approach, we were able to investigate the scroll without any manual labor (e.g. unwrapping or cleaning). We showed that the method also works for heavily soiled scrolls where nothing is readable with the naked eye. This can help conservators to store all writings before they may be erased by the cleaning process. Finally, we present a manual technique to virtually unwrap and post-process the documents resulting in a 2-D image of all bamboo slips.