Catswatch

Carnegie Mellon University scientists are developing new software that could revolutionize the way archaeologists work. The new software is being developed to scan 200-year-old gravestones at Old St Luke’s Church in nearby Carnegie to help its Episcopal pastor identify all the names on the cemetery’s tombstones.

The church, established in 1765 as a stockade church for British soldiers, is operated as a special events building for weddings, book reviews and special holiday services. In the past weeks, Prof Yang Cai and his team has trekked through the church’s three-acre cemetery, scanning unreadable gravestones and then storing the images on laptops. They are exploring new 3D reconstruction technology to decipher the gravestone names and reconstruct the tombstone surface by applying filtering and detection algorithms for revealing the words on the archaic surfaces. In addition to discovering who is buried in the church cemetery, Prof Cai is also developing a digital cemetery for Old St Luke’s Church.
According to Prof Cai, their goal is to take the guess work out of archeology and make this reconstruction technology available for a variety of other industry sectors, such as the security and medical fields.read summary...