Francis Farrelly
Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi - CNR Via dei Taurini 19, 00185 Roma
Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi - CNR Via dei Taurini 19, 00185 Roma
The Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, buried under twenty meters of volcanic mud and ash from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, houses an extensive library of papyrus scrolls. These scrolls, carbonized by the intense heat, have remained preserved for centuries, unlike other ancient texts that have decayed upon exposure to air. In 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge achieved a significant breakthrough by extracting over four passages of previously unread text from an unopened carbonized scroll. This was accomplished through the development of machine learning techniques for virtually unrolling the scrolls and recognizing the ink. This initial success demonstrated the feasibility of the approach. The next phase involves scaling these techniques to read entire scrolls and establishing an efficient scanning protocol to process the approximately 300 extant scrolls, primarily located in Naples. The primary technical challenges to be addressed are large-scale segmentation and scanning.