Content representation and analysis: the Magic Project and the Illuminated Dante Project integrated systems for multimedia information retrieval

From the collaboration between the Department of Humanities and the Department of Physics "Ettore Pancini" of the University of Naples "Federico II", with the addition of three private companies, the "MAGIC" project started in mid-2023. The project aims to create a Service Center for the treatment, conservation, digitization, preservation and enhancement of the archival and book heritage. Starting from the Illuminated Dante project, that is, the digitization (managed by the Department of Humanities) of the illuminated manuscripts of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, dated between the 14th and 15th centuries and preserved in national and international museums, libraries and archives, the MAGIC project as a whole proceeds towards information systems and information retrieval systems that aim to acquire information, to archive it and to preserve it in specific databases, without neglecting its distribution and communication. The analysis of the contents and the extraction of the information also lead to a second objective: the easy readability of the text. Artificial intelligence algorithms are being used as image filtering techniques in what is commonly called the bleed-through effect, where ink bleeds between the front and back of manuscripts, making them difficult to read.