$45,000 Segmentation Tooling (June 14th)
“Segmentation” means identifying sheets of papyrus in a 3D scan of a scroll. Learn more in “Tutorial 3: Segmentation and Flattening”.
We have a couple of contractors and volunteers who have been segmenting, and this is their progress so far.

We’d like to get to 1000-2000 cm2 of high-quality segments, and for that we need better tools and algorithms. Good tools and algorithms make a huge difference: you can see the enourmous jump when UKy/EduceLab released their Monster Segment, which was enabled by their new tool, Quick Segment.
We are awarding prizes to make it easier and faster to segment the scrolls, with the ultimate goal of fully mapping both scrolls.
- $45,000 total, 7 prizes. 2x10k, 5x5k.
- Any tools, documentation, notebooks, analysis, to help with segmentation and flattening of the scrolls. Must be open source.
- Anything that actually gets used by the community (by people doing segmentation) will have a much higher chance of winning.
- What we would like to see:
- A list of feature requests from people actively segmenting can be found here. We strongly recommend you to look at this list and get in touch with active segmenters on Discord. Let's make their life easier!
- In general, we would love to see people build on existing open source tools, especially those that have been built in the community. But all submissions are welcome!
- Improvements that make the tools super fast to use. For example, the ability to start segmenting without downloading all of the scroll data; streaming from our download server, for example. (We are happy to host some server-side software if this helps!)
- Making it faster to move between slices in tools like Volume Cartographer, by only loading the parts of the images that are relevant for your current segmentation task.
- Super fast keyboard shortcut based interfaces.
- AI / computer vision assistance to make segmentation faster and more accurate.
- Quick visualizations to ensure that your segmentation makes sense from different angles.
- You may make multiple submissions. We may award a single prize to a set of multiple submissions by one person or team.
- Your submission will be judged subjectively: the Technical Review Team will decide what they think are the best open source contributions.
- If you are submitting as a team, the team leader should make the submission, and is responsible for distributing the prize money among the team.
- Submissions are closed on Wednesday June 14th 11:59pm PT.
- Submit using this form.
To get a sense of what segmentation looks like right now, check out the segmentation videos linked in Tutorial 5: Advanced Topics.