Hoku—A Multispectral Software Tool to Recover Erased Writing on Palimpsests

Abstract

An image processing software package called Hoku is available to the public, free-of-charge, for use in recovering erased text from multispectral images of palimpsests. This software was developed by the author for his own use in recovering text, but has been built with an intuitive user interface that makes it suitable for non-technical users. It is written in Java and runs on both Windows and macOS computers. In this article, examples will be given of Hoku image processing results on data sets from three imaging systems—MegaVision, Phase One, and Lumiere Technology.