The researchers from MIT and Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in the United States developed the algorithms that acquire images from individual sheets in stacks of paper, and interprets the often distorted or incomplete images as individual letters. To test the device, they stacked several sheets of paper, each of which had a single letter printed upon it. This device could allow museums and research facilities to uncover the secrets of ancient books that they are terrified to open for fear of damaging the valuable texts.
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Scientists have developed a new system that reads down the pages of a closed book.
Georgia Tech worked on developing another algorithm that can read those images and translate them since they tend to come distorted and sometimes incomplete. This interference prevents the current device from counting beyond 20 individual sheets, and it can only read the print on the top nine.
It all comes down to terahertz radiation, described as “the band of electromagnetic radiation between microwaves and infrared light”.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new system that reads down the pages of a closed book. It’s kind of like if Superman used his X-ray vision for doing nerdy stuff like reading books, except that Superman is a letter-interpretation algorithm and his X-ray vision is terahertz radiation.
Heshmat revealed that the Metropolitan Museum in NY showed a lot of interest in their system.
Now terahertz radiation is widely researched for potential applications use in security screening, due to the face that different chemicals absorb different frequencies of terahertz radiation to different degrees, and then produce distinctive frequency signatures for each.
While the technology is still in the early stages, the researchers have been able to identify the distances between the first 20 pages of a book, and recognize individual letters printed on the first nine.
How does terahertz radiation work? The difference in light wave absorption between the ink and blank paper then allows the the system to produce an image of the written letters.
Terahertz frequency profiles can distinguish between ink and blank paper in a way X-rays cannot. He adds that the system could be used to analyze any materials organized in thin layers, such as coatings on machine parts or pharmaceuticals. The tetrahertz camera used by the team can also emit the radiation in super short microbursts which measure the depth of a page in a book by timing how long it took for the radiation to be reflected from the book back to the camera.
However, the team has a minor setback with the terahertz camera system, although the book absorbs the majority of the radiation, sometimes the radiation bounces between the pages before going back to the reading sensor and the team has to clear that “noise” before reading the end product.
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Terahertz imaging is still a relatively young technology, however, and researchers are constantly working to improve both the accuracy of detectors and the power of the radiation sources, so deeper penetration should be possible, researchers said.
