Researcher Make a Jigsaw of East German Secret Files
Researcher Make a Jigsaw of East German Secret Files
May 11, 2007: German researchers are working to piece together the minute details of millions of shredded documents that once held the key to East German secret police files.
Just as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Stasi secret police got to work on destroying the sensitive secret documents. Only problem is, they did not anticipate the technology available in 2007 to put it all back together again, especially as most of the documents were shredded by hand as due to their panic in trying to get the job done as quickly as possible. .
Under a US$8.53 million government funded project, researchers at the Frauenhofer Institute in Germany are working on complicated computerized algorithms to create a jigsaw like puzzle in order to determine some of the information contained on the 45 million documents.
Most of the sensitive information the Stasi kept on foreign leaders and their own citizens was ripped into somewhere between eight and thirty pieces per page. These 45 million shredded documents were kept in 16,250 sacks and confiscated after the reunification of Germany in 1990.
Researchers are looking to piece up to 400 sacks of material back together again over the next two years. While the algorithms were developed 15 years ago, modern scanning technologies will be deployed to scan both sides of the torn piece, with the data fed into the system for interpretation. The research will use colour recognition, handwriting analysis, texture analysis and pattern recognition to try and piece together the torn-up information.
With a cluster of 16 computers networked to undertake the analysis work, 25 total features of the torn-up remains including colour, handwriting, patterns and texture, in order to separate the pieces into clusters of common features. Much like we put together a jigsaw puzzle, each cluster will be dealt with separately in order to connect the pieces.
The researchers claim hand-torn documents are actually easier to reconstruct given the differing shapes of their pieces.