The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

KNOX, EASTON, AND JOHNSTON 5
in Webster, New York, whose background is in electrical engineering and
optics. Knox advocated submitting a grant proposal to the Center for
Electronic Imaging Systems, part of the New York State Center for Advanced
Technology. The grant was secured in 1993. This trio of collaborators has
been working on the application of imaging technologies to various digital
image restoration applications ever since. Several students also have
participated in this research, including Monica Barbu, Mithra Moosavi,
and Joseph Tusinski.
Because we are neither linguists nor biblical scholars, we deemed it
essential to find a scholar with these skills who could suggest appropriate
documents for analysis and could assess the success of the techniques.
Into that void stepped James H. Charlesworth of the Princeton
Theological Seminary, with whom fortunately we made contact in 1996.
We have greatly benefited from his wisdom, knowledge, enthusiasm, and
support, as well as that of his student, Henry Rietz.
OUR TOOLS
We have assembled an armory of tools that are useful for diverse tasks in
digital image restoration. To gather our own multispectral imagery, we
obtained a specialized DCS digital camera through a generous donation
from Eastman Kodak Company. The camera has a CCD sensor of size
1,280 (1,024 pixels that is sensitive to light over a range of wavelengths
from the ultraviolet to the near infrared). The camera housing accepts
standard Nikkor lenses, of which we have a small assortment, including
a lens with quartz elements (instead of glass) that may be used to gather
images in ultraviolet light. The DCS camera system is controlled from a
notebook computer and is quite portable.
An important feature of this camera system is its ability to display
images immediately, which allows the user to assess quality and to
reshoot the images if necessary. Exposure times typically are quite short
(under 1 second), which limits exposure of documents to potentially
harmful illumination. The range of wavelengths (and thus color) of the
imaged light is constrained by placing colored-glass filters over the lens
during exposure. We have used a set of standard astronomical filters,
which restrict transmitted light to six bands: one each for red, green, and
blue visible light, one band in the ultraviolet region, and two infrared
bands. The images are in digital form and may be processed in digital
computers using commercial software, such as Adobe PhotoShop, or Xerox