the-bible-and-the-dead-sea-scrolls

KNOX, EASTON, AND JOHNSTON 11
information can be extracted from the digital image of the photograph
and enhanced to reveal characters in the degraded regions that could not
be seen otherwise.
DISCOVERY OF NEW CHARACTERSINTHETEMPLE SCROLL
In a digital image, color information is stored in the three “separations,”
called red, green, and blue. The camera or input scanner “sees” these separations
by imaging through red, green, and blue filters, in a manner very
similar to color-sensitive sensors in the human eye. The signals from the
three sensors in the eye are combined before being transmitted to the
brain, to produce three other signals: one proportional to the “brightness”
of the scene and two proportional to the “color.” The color, or “chrominance,”
is the difference of the red and green signals and of the blue and
a “yellow” signal (formed by summing the red and green signals).
Color “spaces” are mathematical constructs used to represent the colors
in a manner similar to that used in the eye. One example is the Xerox
“YES” color space. The Y-component contains the brightness information
and is the analogue of a color video image viewed with a black-andwhite
television set. The chrominance components E and S contain the
color information, in the form of red-minus-green and blue-minus-yellow
components, respectively. The equations that compute the YES components
from the original RGB (red, green, and blue) components are:
Formula 1: Y = (0.253 � R) + (0.684 � G) + (0.063 � B)
Formula 2: E = (0.500 � R) – (0.500 � G) + 0.000 � B)
Formula 3: S = (0.250 � R) + (0.250 � G) – (0.500 � B)
To extract the color information from these photographs of the Temple
Scroll, the Y, E, and S separations of the image were generated using the
three formulae from the R, G, and B outputs of the scanner. We found
that the legibility of the text in the degraded sections of the scroll was
much improved when viewed in the E separation.
In figure 5, an enlarged section of column 17 is shown. On the left is
the original scanned image. On the right is the E-channel separation,
which represents the differences between red and green in the image.
Some remarkable information has appeared in the processed image.
Additional characters can be seen in the top four lines superimposed on
the characters in the original. In the blank space below the fourth line, a
new line of characters has appeared.