[Imageworld] Research Associate

[P L Rosin]

Research Associate

Cardiff University / Prifysgol Caerdydd
Cardiff School of Computer Science 

Reading the unreadable 

Virtual visualisation for information recovery from unopenable
historical documents 

Applications are invited for a Research Associate to work on a £1.35M
EPSRC (Cardiff/London) funded project that aims to enable the reading of
fragile important historic documents without the need to physically
unravel them, thus providing valuable information to a wide range of
scholarly disciplines. This will be achieved by advanced image
processing/computer vision algorithms from data obtained performing 3D
imaging using high definition X-ray microtomography (XMT). The main
objective being to unravel, virtually, the surface and present the user
with a readable image of text. This is a unique opportunity to be at the
centre of work with image analysts, biophysicists, achivists and
paleographers in discovery of unrevealed history.

The project is a collaboration between Cardiff University (Prof. Tim
Wess, School of Optometry and Vision Sciences and Dr. Paul Rosin, School
of Computer Science) and Queen Mary University of London (Dr Graham
Davis, School of Medicine and Dentistry). The project also has
collaborative links with the National Archive, British Library, Bodleian
Library, York Minster, the National Museum of Wales and the National
Archive for Scotland. It offers an opportunity to build on work already
established looking at documents such as the Dead Sea scrolls, Domesday
Book and the Treaty of Perpetual Peace.

You will be a member of the Geometric Computing and Computer Vision
Group in the School of Computer Science and will develop techniques for
virtually unraveling the document surface from the 3D tomographic image.
As such, specific areas to be addressed include anisotropic 3D noise
reduction, density thresholding to identify the document voxels
(involving correction of topological errors), unraveling of the document
voxels (e.g. using multi-dimensional scaling of geodesic distances
within the document), volume/surface rendering, and post processing to
improve readability.

You will have a PhD in Computer Science or related area, and a strong
publication record in an area appropriate to the post.

Salary: £29704 - £35469 per annum 

Informal enquiries regarding the post are welcome and may be made to Dr.
P L Rosin, email: Paul.Rosin at cs.cf.ac.uk or telephone +44 (0) 29 2087
5585. 

To work for an employer that values and promotes equality of
opportunity, visit www.cardiff.ac.uk/jobs telephone + 44 (0) 29 2087
4017 or email vacancies at cardiff.ac.uk for an application form quoting
vacancy number 835. 

Closing date: Wednesday, 7 January 2009.
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| Dr. Paul Rosin                                                     |
| Cardiff School of Computer Science                                 |
| Cardiff University                          Paul.Rosin at cs.cf.ac.uk |
| 5 The Parade, Roath,             tel/fax: +44 (0)29 2087 5585/4598 |
| Cardiff, CF24 3AA, UK          http://users.cs.cf.ac.uk/Paul.Rosin |
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