Open Problems: Why Reading Every Herculaneum Scroll Is Still a Challenge | Vesuvius Challenge

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Last updated: July 10, 2026

In 2026, PHerc. 1667 was virtually unwrapped and read without physically opening the scroll (see References).

We are no longer asking whether a sealed Herculaneum scroll can be read. It can. The harder question is how to make the same process work automatically, reliably, and at scale for every scroll.

🙋 How you can help ​

This post doubles as a technical map of the whole pipeline and an onboarding document for anyone who wants to work on it. There are six concrete ways to contribute introduced as we go — look for the 🙋 callouts in Sections 2-4! Write on Discord for more information!

📊 Where is the data ​

Data Browser — https://scrollprize.org/data_browser: each scroll links to a page containing the available scanned CT volumes and the virtually unwrapped papyrus “segments” produced by the Vesuvius Challenge team, together with useful representations (to be defined later in this blog post) and ink detection predictions.

Direct access (S3 bucket) — https://vesuvius-challenge-open-data.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/index.html

Curated datasets (ink and spiral) — hosted on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/buckets/scrollprize/datasets

Model checkpoints — hosted on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/scrollprize

🧑‍💻 Where is the code ​

Most of the code is publicly available in the GitHub ScrollPrize account, especially in the villa monorepository.

🎓 Related tutorials ​

Hands-on guides for every stage of the pipeline described in this post:

TutorialsUp to date:

Volume Cartographer 3D (VC3D) — installing the software, loading scroll data, navigating volumes, and annotating fibers and windings (early draft)

Spiral Fitting — fitting the global spiral prior to a scroll

Ink Detection — training and running ink-detection models

Archived (describe earlier tooling and data layouts):

Scanning · Representation · Segmentation · Segmentation and Flattening

The pipeline​

Reading a scroll is a chain of complex problems:

Scanning : producing a 3D X-ray volume that preserves the relevant physical signal.

Unrolling : inferring the hidden papyrus sheets from that 3D volume and flattening them.

Ink recovery : detecting or segmenting the ink signal on, or near, the recovered writing surface.

Scanning

Unwrapping

Flattening

Ink Detection

Content feeling overwhelming? Catch up by asking Philodemus.<br>Ask Philodemus<br>The most important thing to understand is what we actually get after scanning. We do not get sheets. We do not get a mesh, a graph, or a map of which layer connects to which. We get a 3D grid of voxels .

A voxel is the 3D version of a pixel: a tiny cube with an intensity value. The scan gives us billions or trillions of these cubes.

What it does not contain is information about mappings to different physical objects in the scroll, or any information about what each voxel represents.

To reconstruct a scroll, the first step then is to find efficient and descriptive “representations” of this scan volume which capture the important properties — such as where individual papyrus sheets are — that allow us to unwrap it and read it.

That is why the pipeline is difficult. We are reconstructing geometry and extracting text from a damaged carbonized object whose internal structure and connectivity is not given to us.

1. Scanning: capturing the signal​

The scrolls are scanned using synchrotron X-ray micro-computed tomography , or X-ray micro-CT. The primary difference between a medical CT and the type used to image the scrolls is that we require a significantly higher resolution. To achieve this, we must use a very high power source. The source we use is known as a synchrotron – a type of particle accelerator – which takes electrons and fires them at very high speeds, generating a beam of X-rays, which is shot through the scroll. As the beam moves through the scroll it is differently affected by the materials composing it, which have different densities and properties. Some materials absorb the beam more, some less, and these differences are measured at the detector. This is known as attenuation contrast , and can reveal fine details when materials differ in absorbency (e.g. papyrus vs air). The eruption of Vesuvius carbonized these scrolls — papyrus and ink alike. Unfortunately for us, carbon ink on carbonized papyrus (both rich in the same element, carbon) provides very little of attenuation contrast, so ink is often not simply "bright" or "dark" in the raw scan.

There is, however, still a signal to be found. Ink may affect the scan in more subtle ways. Texture, morphology, and phase shifts (derived from the refractive index). Frequently, in some combination of all of them. Teasing out these subtle differences is difficult, and is the primary reason we scan at such high resolutions, and why we continue to invest research time into...