Many Open Source Prize winners; 25 days left for Grand Prize; another $12k in prizes

SO CLOSE to reading the scrolls!

Given how many people are working on the Grand Prize — and how secretive most are — we were surprised by the incredible volume and quality of submissions for the $20k Open Source Prize. So much so, that we decided to increase the prize to $25k.

As for the Grand Prize itself, we’re closing in on the deadline of Dec 31st. There have been no submissions yet, but we’re seeing so much activity in the community that we assign a high probability that someone will crack it. If you’re working on the Grand Prize and would like to share your progress confidentially with us, feel free! We can’t give any guidance or feedback until you make a submission, but we’re very curious.

To keep speeding things along, we’re announcing one last tiny prize: 4x$3k by Dec 31st, for any open source tools that increase the probability of the Grand Prize being solved (same terms as the last Open Source Prize).

Finally, we’re still releasing more data regularly. Stay tuned to #announcements in Discord!

All Grand Prize-sized segments released by the Segmentation Team.

Open Source Prize winners

Next-gen Volume Cartographer by Philip Allgaier / @spacegaier: $8,000

Philip is new to the community, and entered with so many key contributions to Volume Cartographer that we just had to increase the maximum prize amount for him. He has been effectively working down the wishlist of the segmentation team, building layer scanning, anchoring, metadata for auto-segmenting, slice skipping, and a litany of UX improvements and bug fixes. Really well done, Philip!

Segment Browser by Johannes Rudolph / @jrudolph: $5,000

Another new entrant to the community is Johannes. His Segment Browser tool lets you browse all released segments in 2D, showing the inference from Youssef’s First Letters Prize model. A true community service! Besides this Johannes has been making many contributions to Volume Cartographer.

Ink Detection Masks by Anton Repushko / @repushko: $5,000

Anton Repushko — yet another newcomer to the community — has generously shared his ink labels with everyone. About 5-6x more than the sets released by Luke and Youssef, these labels will help with ink detection for the grand prize. He has already shown on his own models how much better they perform using these labels:

Since we had so many good submissions, we decided to increase the prize pool to $25k, and award many more prizes at the $1,000 level. Congrats to all winners for great contributions to the community!

• Chuck / @khartes_chuck for being extremely persistent in fixing the sharkbite bug in vc_render.

  

• Giorgio Angelotti / @jordi45698 for a standalone crackle annotator (used by Sean for his annotations, see below) as well as a contribution to the existing Crackle-Viewer, as well as contributions with data loading and math.

  

• Sean Johnson / @bruniss for labels of crackle, for use in ink detection; where it has already proven useful for validating model outputs.

  

• Timo Meireman / @timo_71099 for a new tool “Omit” exploring ink detection with computer vision techniques.

  

• Yao Hsiao / @.yaohsiao and Dalufishe / @dalufish for new features in Segment Viewer, analysis of the of closely wrapped papyrus on ink detection, and continued work on VC Whiteboard.

• Brett Olsen / @brett_olsen for a potential new way to annotate single-sheet segments with high accuracy.

• Santiago Pelufo / @spelufo for auto-orientation of rendered segments, downloading masks, and labels for instance segmentation.