Matching and Searching the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are of immense historical significance. Unfortunately, the scrolls have deteriorated over the millennia and continue to deteriorate since their discovery. Thus, it is of paramount importance to preserve for posterity the current state of the material as best as possible. This goal is being pursued in various ways. One is via the ongoing digitization efforts of the Israel Antiquities Authority, which complement the older infrared images of plates of fragments done under the auspices of the Palestine Archaeological Museum. Each of the thousands of parchment and papyrus fragments is carefully placed on a black felt background and then photographed at high resolution. Resultant color and infrared images are being made available to all in the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. At the same time, we are in the midst of an international project with the goal of designing and building algorithmic tools that will relate the different images of scroll fragments with each other and with their textual transcriptions. As part of this effort, we are in the process of incorporating a deep-learning based segmentation method into the pipeline, which will allow one to manipulate images of the individual fragments themselves. Previous segmentation efforts succeeded in removing most of the shadows from the older images but failed to remove from the foreground of the new images those parts that show the Japanese tissue paper used by conservators to strengthen the edges of the fragment and hold it in place. We solve the problem of identifying and removing the tissue from the segmented images. This advance dramatically improves the effectiveness of our matching algorithms for searching among the old plates for the location of the newly-digitized fragments. In particular, the improved matching has allowed us to locate two fragments whose positions on the old plates were not recorded. The matching algorithm is being incorporated in the new platform and will begin serving scroll scholars in the near future.