Few days left for the $100,000 Ink Detection & $45,000 Segmentation Tooling Prizes
Get your submissions in!!
As the Vesuvius Challenge is entering the homestretch of two major prizes, there’s a lot going on. In this newsletter we’ll try to cover the developments, but honestly there has been too much to cover, so sorry in advance if we don’t mention your project!
Experience has taught us that a lot can still happen in the last few days, so don’t hesitate to make your submission. Good luck everyone!
First a little diversion: we have joined the EduceLab team on a trip to Naples to image the Herculaneum scrolls and fragments. It was great meeting all the (super nice and passionate!) people managing and studying this unique collection. We’ve been posting photos in #offtopic on Discord.
Tons of good discussions on Kaggle!
RICHI has been working on another large contribution to Volume Cartographer, which looks promising to increase the productivity of segmenters.
Yao Hsiao has made a viewer for multiple segments at the same time.
Chuck made a pretty advanced segmentation tool called Khartes.
Various people think they’re seeing ink.. but mostly from individual letters. They might be onto something, but it’s also easy to hallucinate and see things that aren’t there. For the First Letters prize we expect to see lines of text, like we see on the fragments. Still, some of these look quite promising, such as this one from Casey Handmer, which might be part of a letter.. or a bee leg!
Brett Olson spent hours refining the ink labels for the public fragments (data here).
Our segmenters have been busy. They have segmented almost 400 square centimeters.
If you missed our first Papyrology Q&A, fret not, it was all recorded. Santiago Pelufo did a nice writeup which we put in the FAQ.
WayneWayneHello has continued his quest of scanning campfire scrolls himself, and has even bought an old CT machine.
