What Does That Gravestone Say?

New scanning techniques make worn gravestones legible, with plenty of other scientific possibilities.

You’ve probably wandered through a graveyard and noticed that some older inscriptions are so worn that they’re illegible. Perhaps you’ve even wondered about the stories behind them,whose bones are lying there.   Thanks to a new project you might be able to find out one day. Scientists at the Ambient Intelligence Lab atCarnegie Mellon Cylab have developed a way to take hi-res scans of the tombstones that can reveal the carving. After that, the scans are matched against a database of carvings to show the words.  To date, the most advanced technique has been hand-tracing by archaeologists, which is hardly hi-tech.   “We have designed special filters of 3D data that can detect curvature orlinear features on a surface," Dr. Yung Cai, director of the AI Lab, told the BBC. "This is similar to the human visual experience – we usually see thegazed area in high resolution but the peripheral area in a blurred vision."   Researchers have been refining their technique at the graveyard at Old St. Luke’s Church in Pittsburgh.  Dr. Cai anticipates that the technology could be used to help unmanned vehicles map ruins, as well as aid doctors with tongue inspections, or possibly even predict tsunamis by examining oceansurface patterns.