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Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
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Re: Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
#22> The autosegmentation jumps frequently between adjacent sheets, so is not yet precise enough to reveal contiguous texts, but it coarsely follows the entire scroll. Maybe a stupid idea, but has anyone tried to make a new scroll with known content and markers/known coordinates, and then cook it so as to bring it to a state close to the ones we're trying to unroll. And then scan it, and use that to fine-tune the softwa…
> The autosegmentation jumps frequently between adjacent sheets
The rests of fibers in the cut are exactly like a barcode. They would need a database of each limit and then something to match barcodes. Easier said than done, of course. Other possibility would be to use fiber angles.
Re: Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
#23This project is a gem, I invite everybody to read their landing page, especially the page announcing the Grand Prize winner of last year, where they also quickly describe the project [1], and the Master Plan [2], where they talk about their goals. As a recap: - The real, narrative part of ancient Roman and Greek history comes from the tiny minority of texts survived by being copied through the centuries by medieval m…
Grazie, Moregon, per aver scritto una sinossi così meravigliosa e completa di questi eventi entusiasmanti. Anch’io sono molto entusiasta di questi eventi. Ti andrebbe di scrivermi un messaggio per salutarmi? Ho guardato il tuo profilo, ma non ho trovato informazioni di contatto.
Re: Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know they have instructions on where to buy papyrus and how to cook it to resemble the conditions of the original scrolls, but from what I understand, nobody has done what you suggest. It sounds like a good idea to me also, but a few suggestions on why they haven't done it yet: 1) Scanning a scroll costs around $40k, between the trip to London, renting the equipment, paying the staff etc. 2) I'm not sure that just…
1/ and 2/ are of course good objections; I wasn't aware of the cost of a scan (but this kind of experiment could be done by the organizers, saving on trip costs). But I don't think step 3 is strictly necessary. The main point would be to improve software unrolling, using information from the structure of the roll. So it may be enough to simply put printer's mark at regular intervals, with references.
I see what you mean, before I had assumed you meant an exact replica. If you "just" want to write reference marks to help the segmentation models, then you don't need a papyrologist.
It's still something that only the organizers could do, since I don't see a volunteer team being able to afford the expenses. I don't know if the reason they haven't done it until now it's simply that they're a small outfit that has to juggle different priorities, or if they have judged it not worth it technically!
Re: Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
#25Given this is a join over image analysis, text recognition, data science and a huge complex 3D analytical model of scans which has to be mapped to the surface states, unrolled, and then subjected to edge and other discrimination, I think the application of ML and other novel techniques is great. The potential for applying lessons learned to other problems in complex surface/manifold scanning, "reading" states from di…
The whole thing is kind of a trolling exercise towards data-science people.
One of the usual dataset tutorial in data-science is something called the swiss-roll [1]. Here the exercise look the same but it's totally different because of the quantity of data available.
In the typical swiss-roll dataset the goal is to make the structure emerge from data, whereas in the Vesuvius challenge, we presumably know the structure : the papyrus has been rolled and we want to extract the data.
All the fancy techniques like manifold learning are therefore irrelevant for this problem. So it's back to the basics : statistical modelling.
You build a probabilistic model with some unknown parameters and you maximize the likelihood of the observed data with strong regularization and handcrafted priors.
So your observation data is 3d voxel volume [2], and your desired output is a 2d image of the unrolled scroll.
So intuitively you may want to define your model as a parametrized by theta unroll function : unrolltheta(x,y,z) -> u,v which map a voxel to a pixel position in the unrolled scroll.
Which you then apply to the voxels, obtain mapped pixels and group-by sum to obtain a 2d image which you pass through a neural network to evaluate whether the thing look like what you want (a prior built on other papyrus from what you expect to see).
Instead what you want to do is the reverse : You want to define you model as a parametrized by theta roll function : rolltheta( u,v ) -> x,y,z which map a pixel position in the unrolled scroll to a voxel in space : From 2d to 3d (aka from lower dimensional space to higher dimensional space).
In the 3d space the data will lie on a 2d manifold, this allows you to discriminate your function by how well they align with the slices : from your rolltheta function you can generate a 3d voxel volume of air or papyrus which you can align with your scan. Then you can unroll your scan by "gathering" the corresponding voxel for each pixel of your unrolled scroll. And then eventually apply the same neural network prior which evaluates scrolliness (if you don't have enough data to build it, now it's not absolutely necessary because we have other regularization terms (the alignment).
What remains to be used is the geometrical properties of a rolled scroll : presumably the paper didn't cross over-itself, so this constrain the rolltheta function with a prior like in repulsive surfaces [3] [4]. And prior based on stretchiness of papyrus (or tearing points of the papyrus).
Once you have your likelihood loss function, it's brute-force time, grab your global optimizer and sample the solution, unroll the papyrus, read the treasure map, find the gold and recoup your investment ; (what!!! are you really saying there is no gold ? how are we gonna pay for the work ? let's make it an open data challenge).
[1] https://scikit-learn.org/dev/auto_examples/manifold/plot_swi... [2] https://colab.research.google.com/github/ScrollPrize/vesuviu... [3] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/RepulsiveSurfaces/i... [4] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/RepulsiveCurves/ind...
Re: Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
#26They say they have Python and C APIs that can be used to explore the scroll. I had a look and they have a "tutorial" in a Python notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/github/ScrollPrize/vesuviu... But I can't make any sense of that, unfortunately :( can someone perhaps explain in terms a programmer would understand, how would I go about using this API to find the text? As far as I can see the dataset just conta…
This scroll hasn't ever and can't ever been unrolled. It's too fragile for that. The only thing we DO have is a high resolution scan. The trick then of course is how do you "unroll" the scan. Furthermore the scroll is damaged quite heavily. It has carbonized entirely. This means that even _when_ unrolled, it'd be very hard to read. Some progress has been made reading bits and pieces of the scroll using only the scan,…
I think you misunderstood my question.
> because the text is as of yet unknown. Those slices are all we have to go on.
Yes, which is why I asked: "how would I go about using this API to find the text?"
That seems to be the crux of the challenge? Given a bunch of scroll cross-sections, find the text? My question is just how you would go about doing that! What techniques are used, algorithms etc.
Re: Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
#27[deleted]
Re: Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
This scroll hasn't ever and can't ever been unrolled. It's too fragile for that. The only thing we DO have is a high resolution scan. The trick then of course is how do you "unroll" the scan. Furthermore the scroll is damaged quite heavily. It has carbonized entirely. This means that even _when_ unrolled, it'd be very hard to read. Some progress has been made reading bits and pieces of the scroll using only the scan,…
I think you misunderstood my question. > because the text is as of yet unknown. Those slices are all we have to go on. Yes, which is why I asked: "how would I go about using this API to find the text?" That seems to be the crux of the challenge? Given a bunch of scroll cross-sections, find the text? My question is just how you would go about doing that! What techniques are used, algorithms etc.
I mean that's largely an unanswered question. Aparantly there's currently a semi-automated algorithm that works but needs a LOT of supervision, making it much too expensive to use to "unroll" all the rolls.
As to how you would even go about using the slices, keep in mind that a stack of slices gives you a volumetric model. The scan basically provides a high resolution volumetric model of the density of the scrolls. You'd need to somehow use this density information to trace a path along the curl of the scroll. This then gets you a density map of the scroll as if it was unrolled. Then the next trick is to somehow turn that into legible text.
The details of how to do the above are currently unknown. There's a prize for whoever figures it out.
Re: Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
#29> The autosegmentation jumps frequently between adjacent sheets, so is not yet precise enough to reveal contiguous texts, but it coarsely follows the entire scroll. Maybe a stupid idea, but has anyone tried to make a new scroll with known content and markers/known coordinates, and then cook it so as to bring it to a state close to the ones we're trying to unroll. And then scan it, and use that to fine-tune the softwa…
They already have human segmenters segmenting existing scrolls, which presumably is used to train the program in much the same way.
Re: Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
#30> The autosegmentation jumps frequently between adjacent sheets, so is not yet precise enough to reveal contiguous texts, but it coarsely follows the entire scroll. Maybe a stupid idea, but has anyone tried to make a new scroll with known content and markers/known coordinates, and then cook it so as to bring it to a state close to the ones we're trying to unroll. And then scan it, and use that to fine-tune the softwa…
> The autosegmentation jumps frequently between adjacent sheets The rests of fibers in the cut are exactly like a barcode. They would need a database of each limit and then something to match barcodes. Easier said than done, of course. Other possibility would be to use fiber angles.
Thinking about it, the whole part is not necessary. A partial read of the first upper cm could make the process much faster discarding the obviously different parts. If this can be converted to a barcode somehow printed and then read with a barcode scanner to produce a translation, we could have a way to prefilter most of the pieces that are too different to be neighbors.