Methods for Written Ancient Music Restoration

Access to collections of cultural heritage is increasingly becoming a topic of interest for institutions like libraries. With the easy access to information provided by technologies such as the Internet, new ways exist for consulting ancient documents without exposing them to more dangers of degradation. One of those types of documents is written ancient music. These documents suffer from multiple kinds of degradation, where bleed-through outstands as the most damaging. While restoration methods are present in the literature in relation to text documents and artworks, little attention has been given to the restoration of ancient music. During this thesis, two papers have been written and published: “Methods for Written Ancient Music Restoration” and “Restoration of Doublesided Ancient Music Documents with Bleed-through”. These papers relate to the two main problems found in images of ancient music and therefore researched within the thesis: background homogenization and bleed-through. These papers therefore describe the work carried out in this thesis and consequently summarize it. As such, their inclusion follows, comprising the extended abstract.