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Torn documents on their way to digital acquisition
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Virtual puzzle in a search area
Automated reconstruction of secret police files
Even today in times of e-mail and the internet, paper is still an important secret carrier. That is why delicate files of the East German Secret Police (Stasi) were to be destroyed in a cloak-and-dagger operation in autumn 1989. The result: the pieces of torn paper from an estimated 45 million pages of documents destroyed at that time are still today stored in 16 250 bags.
On behalf of the government, the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology IPK in Berlin is now going to reconstruct this gigantic puzzle. In a pilot project, the contents of 400 bags will be reconstructed by means of automation in the next two years.
The system for the automatic reconstruction of destroyed documents, developed at the Fraunhofer IPK (Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology) is sub-divided into two processes. In a first step, the system determines features such as colour, ruling, typeface or texture of the digitally recorded pieces of paper.
Based on these features, the number of possible reconstruction counterparts can be narrowed down. So, the subsequent virtual reconstruction can be accelerated. At the same time, the obtained features can be used for processing of the contents and for targeted research in the documents. After having narrowed down the search area, the pages will be reconstructed on the basis of the found pieces of paper.
Starting with pieces with a lot of information, possible matching pieces will be selected on the basis of the contour and surface information of torn and on the basis of segment and edge information of shredded documents. If possible, they will then be added to the previous reconstruction results. So, the paper can be pieced together bit by bit to form complete pages again.
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