Do you know what kinds of features the model is picking up on to distinguish ink from papyrus? And did you have any labeled data (images where a human expert has identified ink or perhaps a scan of a burnt scroll with known content) to help train it?

Certainly my Mark 1 eyeballs would not obviously perform better than random guessing at this task. Although my eyeballs are, if nothing else, nerfed by only being able to see a 2D slice of the data.

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verditelabs 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes. Most of the ink we have come across is carbon based. This leaves a certain texture on the scrolls that is recoverable and viewable with fairly basic physically based rendering, though how much ink is recoverable varies greatly from one character to the next. I don't have links handy but we just published updates to our data viewer page on our website. Pherc.Paris.4 I believe has the best overlay of ink.

A lot of labeled data is available on our ftp server which has public access

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amluto 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When you say "physically based rendering" do you mean that one could build a PBR model based on the (unrolled?) xray data, render that model, and be able to see the ink?

edit: I found this:

https://scrollprize.org/data_browser#/samples/PHercParis4/se...

The JSON seems to suggest that I'm mostly looking at ink detection output, but I could easily be using the tool wrong.

But I also found this awesome explanation:

https://scrollprize.org/data_fragments

I guess I bunch of the training was done by using fragments of scrolls where ground truth data is available using IR photography.

Also... that xray resolution is absolutely amazing!

	▲	verditelabs an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Some images on that page, specifically the "alpha composite" and "combined alpha" images, are a pretty simple PBR (if it's even that complex; it's just a composite rendering over a 3d array to a 2d image) rendering with no ML based ink detection in the input.

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londons_explore 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I assume that's because the writer probably sometimes shortly after re-inking the writing instrument was putting down a 10x thicker layer...