UV Multispectral Imaging System
2019-2020 Freshman Imaging Project at the Rochester Institute of Technology
On the first day of freshman year, we were given an imaging problem to solve.
RIT freshman in the Imaging Science, Motion Picture Science, and Photographic Sciences programs are given the unique opportunity to create an imaging system from scratch in their first year.
No tests. No rigid curriculum.
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Just a project description and a building full of imaging science faculty with open doors.
The Project Description
UV imaging system for Historical Document Discovery
"The goal of this project is to build a UV multi-spectral imaging system to uncover text from faded, damaged or erased documents. From experience, we have noted that imaging in various UV illuminations and then filtering the emitted light with a range of filters in the visible spectrum, has produced great results in the quest to recover illegible or sub-visual texts."
Let's be honest—we all came into this project knowing next to nothing about imaging science. Most of us were handy with a camera, but a project like this was significantly more complex than any of us had ever done before.
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The project was a year-long, hands on class where a group of 19 students from imaging science, motion picture science, and photographic sciences teamed up to design and build a working imaging system from scratch. No step-by-step instruction. Just a problem statement and a lot of room to figure things out for ourselves.
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We quickly realized that the technical challenges were no joke. Fluorescence signals from parchment are extremely faint, so noise is always an issue. Old parchment manuscripts are fragile and can't sit under ultraviolet radiation for extended periods of time, so we had to be careful with exposure times and illumination intensity. Adding filters to build up a multispectral fluorescence data set gives you more information about inks and materials, but it also cuts down on the light in each band. That meant doing point spectroscopy to pick the most useful wavelengths, characterizing our camera and filters, designing a safe UV illumination setup, and deciding how to trade off spatial resolution, spectral coverage, sensitivity, and SNR. On top of that, we had to write an image processing workflow that could take stacks of raw images and turn them into something a curator could actual read.
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This was far more than a homework assignment. We split into teams for hardware/chassis, image capture, illumination, software, and documentation, and then tried to keep everything moving in the same direction. Because it was a year-long project, we also had to navigate people joining and leaving the project between semesters, plus a mid-project pivot to remote learning during COVID. It was an exercise not just in imaging, but in project management, delegation, and just learning how to be a functional research team.
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We had a prototype before being sent home due to COVID, and we were able to wrap up documentation remotely. A few of my peers returned during the summer to finalize the system.
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What started as a first-year project ended up getting real attention. The work was featured by RIT, picked up by outlets like Smithsonian Magazine, and shared by other science and news sites around the world.
The summer team was invited to present at the International Congress on Medieval Studies and at Imagine RIT, alongside professional scholars and researchers.
Every decision we made on this project had to be backed by research and defended in front of faculty, which meant we weren’t just “using” imaging systems, we were learning to think like imaging scientists. Not bad for a bunch of freshmen who started the year Googling “what is fluorescence?”
