[LIS-Forum] Watch: MIT researchers attempt to read books without opening their pages (there's a good reason)

[Padmanabha Vyasamoorthy]

Read about latest technology. India has many brittle unopenable treasure
books.
one day we may benefit! Lis-Forum is text only so I am sending links that
you can cut and paste

==========================
Watch: MIT researchers attempt to read books without opening their pages
(there's a good reason)
​.
Reading fragile old manuscripts will become possible thanks to new
technology.

Play
https://youtu.be/6i25SuJzb0A

It’s nearly impossible to open certain ancient, fragile books without
watching them crumble. But that doesn't mean the treasures will be locked
away in those pages forever. MIT Media Lab scientists are trying to
overcome the problem with a computational imaging system.

This breakthrough lets them read the pages of a book even when it’s closed.
No, really.

The technology uses terahertz radiation, which allows scanning of the pages
one by one – through the cover. There’s also a letter interpretation
algorithm that can help understand incomplete text.

However, there’s a catch. They’ve only managed to develop the technology
sufficiently for it to be able to read around nine pages be
fore it’s overtaken by noise. Don't blame them – after all, the page being
scanned keeps getting farther away, with other material in between. It also
cannot measure the depth after 20 pages.

So, if you do stumble upon an old and delicate manuscript you dare not
open, you’ll have to wait a while before you can hope to interpret its
contents. The power and accuracy of the terahertz technology needs to be
improved significantly in order to make this a possibility.

Still, it's a major development because of the endless possibilities it
offers historians and researchers of the near future.

http://video.scroll.in/816387/watch-mit-researchers-attempt-to-read-books-without-opening-their-pages-theres-a-good-reason

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