Recovery of old dialectal materials and maps through image processing

The preservation of the language and linguistic heritage requires the recovery of older linguistic materials and linguistic maps and their re-publication on hardcopies and in electronic formats. Because of poor technical means used to produce linguistic maps with technologies more than half a century old and because of the less than ideal storage conditions, many of these materials need restoration using digital techniques. We present an analysis of the minimal restoration methods needed and of the restoration and post-processing results, including map layers superposition. 228 original drawings from The New Romanian Linguistic Atlas by Regions - Muntenia and Dobrogea (Noul Atlas Lingvstic Roman pe Regiuni - Muntenia si Dobrogea, NALRR-MD) representing layers of linguistic maps have been processed. A discussion of envisaged further processing methods ends the paper.