Every torn page, whole again.
Untorn rebuilds a torn page from one photo: SAM 3.1 cuts out every piece, and Muse reads the half-letters across each tear. Built for the 15,400 sacks of Stasi files still in pieces.SAM 3.1 cuts the pieces. Muse reads across the tears.
Muse read the page
Read the transcriptOnly C makes words: am, witness.The edge is a three-way tie; reading decides. In 22 stack trials Muse picked the right scrap all 22 times; chance is 1 in 3.Simulated stack tear of three real letters: the same tear paths cut all three pages, so the three edges are identical. A recorded read from the real pipeline.
Why it matters
3.5 million people have asked to read their Stasi files. 15,400 sacks of those files are still in pieces.
The Stasi tore them up by hand in 1989 and 1990. In 30 years, about 600 sacks have been pieced back together by hand; at that pace, the federal auditors say, the rest would take 847 years. Since 2021 the law has made it the Federal Archives’ task, in the hope that victims get their files in their lifetime.
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Tear your own.
Tear a printed page into about 6 pieces, lay them flat on something dark, text side up and not touching, and take one photo from straight above. Untorn runs the whole pipeline on it, live.
Or drop it here: JPEG, PNG or HEIC, up to 15 MB.
With your phone
Take the photo with the phone; the run plays here.
No torn page to hand?
Run this sample through the live pipeline now; it takes about a minute.
Torn by hand: a printed page in 6 pieces, from a live run
It reads other languages too: a German letter of 1922, read and translated
Photos are deleted within 24 hours and never used for training.