Palimpsests refer to historical manuscripts where erased writings have been partially covered by the superimposition of a second writing. By employing imaging techniques, e.g., multispectral imaging, it becomes possible to identify features that are imperceptible to the naked eye, including faded and erased inks. When dealing with overlapping inks, Artificial Intelligence techniques can be utilized to disentangle complex nodes of overlapping letters. In this work, we propose deep learning-based semantic segmentation as a method for identifying and segmenting individual letters in overlapping characters. The experiment was conceived as a proof of concept, focusing on the palimpsests of the Ars Grammatica by Prisciano as a case study. Furthermore, caveats and prospects of our approach combined with multispectral imaging are also discussed.

翻译：重写本指历史手稿中因二次书写叠加而部分覆盖原有擦除文字的手稿。通过多光谱成像等成像技术，可识别包括褪色和擦除墨迹在内的肉眼无法察觉的特征。在处理重叠墨迹时，可运用人工智能技术对复杂重叠字母节点进行解构。本研究提出基于深度学习的语义分割方法，用于识别和分割重叠字符中的单个字母。该实验作为概念验证，以普里西安《语法艺术》重写本为案例开展研究。此外，本文还讨论了该方法结合多光谱成像的注意事项与前景。