Some cultural heritage collections such as manuscripts, scrolls, books, sheet and folia that are faded, damaged, or otherwise unreadable present challenges for curators, collections professionals, scholars, and researchers looking to understand collections more fully. Seeking to uncover distinct features of objects, they have employed modern imaging tools, including sensors, lenses, and illumination sources and thus positioned multispectral imaging as a critical method for cultural heritage imaging. However, cost and ease-of-use have been prohibiting factors. To address this, Rochester Institute of Technology received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (PR-268783-20) to fund an interdisciplinary collaboration to develop a low-cost, portable imaging system with processing software that could be utilized by scholars accessing collections in library, archive, and museum settings, as well as staff working within these institutions. This article addresses our open source and extensible software applications, from the first iteration of software in 2020 to our current effort in 2022-23 which seeks to simplify both processes. An overview of the image capture and processing software to capture and visualize the spectral data offers a basis for demonstrating the possibilities for low-cost, low barrier-to-entry software on cultural heritage imaging, research, preservation, and dissemination.
James Falotico, Kyra Schultz, Etta Arnold, Izzy Moyer, Morteza Maali Amiri, Juilee Decker, David Messinger, Roger Easton, "Build, Select, Reshuffle: Uncovering Distinct Features of Cultural Heritage Objects with Multispectral Imaging" in Archiving Conference, 2023, pp 188 - 191, https://doi.org/10.2352/issn.2168-3204.2023.20.1.38