ThaumatoAnakalyptor

ThaumatoAnakalyptor is an advanced automatic segmentation pipeline designed for high-precision extraction of papyrus sheet segmentations from CT scans of ancient scrolls with minimal human intervention.

0.5 meter long automatic segmentation of scroll 3.

For a detailed report and a roadmap with possible future improvements to Thaumato that could be implemented to win monthly progress prizes, check this PDF.

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Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize

This repository is part of the First Place Grand Prize Submission to the Vesuvius Challenge 2023 from Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor and Julian Schilliger.

Check out the Ink Detection of our winning Grand Prize submission in Youssef Nader's Vesuvius Grand Prize Repository. He combines multiple Machine Learning techniques, like Domain Adaptation and TimeSformer to predict ink with the highest precision.

Secondary Repositories of Julian Schilliger

This fork of Volume Cartographer introduces the Optical Flow Segmentation algorithms and important productivity improvements that enabled the generation of the manual scroll sheet segmentations used in the Grand Prize submission.

Ink labeling and segment inspection can efficiently be done with a purpose built tool named Crackle Viewer.

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Overview

Slice view trough the PointCloud volume of scroll 3 (left) and Sample mesh (right).

Stitched sheet PointCloud during the segmentation process. One half winding.

The core principle of ThaumatoAnakalyptor involves extracting 3D points on papyrus surfaces and grouping them into sheets. These sheets are then used to calculate a mesh that can be used for texturing the sheet's surface.

Process

• 3D Derivative Analysis: The method employs 3D derivatives of volume brightness intensity to detect papyrus sheet surfaces in CT scans. An intuitive explanation is that the side view of a sheet exhibits a bell curve in voxel intensities, allowing for precise detection of the sheet's back and front.

• PointCloud Generation: Local sheet normals are calculated from 3D gradients analysis of the scroll scan. By thresholding on the first and second 1D derrivative in sheet normal direction, the process identifies surface voxels/points, resulting in a detailed surface PointCloud volume of the scroll.

• Segmentation and Mesh Formation: The PointCloud volume is split into subvolumes, and a 3D instance segmentation algorithm clusters the surface points to instances of sheet patches. A Random Walk procedure is employed to stitch patches together into a sheet of points containing the 3D position and their respective winding number. Using Poisson surface reconstruction, the sheet points are then transformed into a mesh.

• Texturing: The mesh is unrolled to generate UV coordinates. Sub-meshes are created for easier texturing. Volume Cartographer's render pipeline textures the sheet's surface.

Running the Code

This example shows how to do segmentation on scroll 3 (PHerc0332).

Download Data

• Scroll Data: Download PHerc0332.volpkg into the directory <scroll-path> and make sure to have the canonical volume ID 20231027191953 in the <scroll-path>/PHerc0332.volpkg/volumes directory. Place the umbilici/scroll_<nr>/umbilicus.txt and umbilici/scroll_<nr>/umbilicus_old.txt files into all the <scroll-path>/PHerc0332.volpkg/volumes/<ID> directories.

• Checkpoint and Training Data: Checkpoint and training data can be downloaded from the private Vesuvius Challenge SFTP server under GrandPrizeSubmission-31-12-2023/Codebase/automatic segmentation/ThaumatoAnakalyptor. The checkpoint last-epoch.ckpt can also be downloaded from Google Drive. The ink detection model can be downloaded from Google Drive.

• Segmentations: The provided segmentations can be downloaded from the private Vesuvius Challenge SFTP server under julian_uploads/finished_segments/ and julian_uploads/scroll3_segments/.

Execute the Pipeline

• Setup: Download the git repository:

  git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/schillij95/ThaumatoAnakalyptor

  Download the checkpoint last-epoch.ckpt for the instance segmentation model and place it into ThaumatoAnakalyptor/mask3d/saved/train/last-epoch.ckpt. Download checkpoint timesformer_wild15_20230702185753_0_fr_i3depoch=12.ckpt for the ink detection model and place it into Vesuvius-Grandprize-Winner/timesformer_wild15_20230702185753_0_fr_i3depoch=12.ckpt.

  Make sure to have installed nvidia docker:

  sudo apt-get install nvidia-docker2

  sudo apt install nvidia-container-runtime

  Restart docker service:

  sudo systemctl restart docker

  Build and start the Docker Container:

  docker build -t thaumato_image -f DockerfileThaumato .

  The following commands might need adjustments based on how you would like to access your scroll data:

  xhost +local:docker
  xhost +local:root
  

  docker run --gpus all --shm-size=150g -it --rm \
  -v <path_to_scroll>:/scroll.volpkg \
  -v <optional_alternative_path_to_scroll>:/scroll_alternative.volpkg \
  -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
  -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
  thaumato_image

  Note: If you run ThaumatoAnakalyptor without the docker, or you update the repository without rebuilding the docker image you need to compile the C++ code by hand.

  cd ThaumatoAnakalyptor/sheet_generation
  mkdir build
  cd build
  cmake ..
  cmake --build .

• GUI ThaumatoAnakalyptor can be used either from command line or as a GUI. The GUI explains its usage in the help tab. After starting the docker image, The GUI can be started with the following command:

  python3 ThaumatoAnakalyptor.py

  ThaumatoAnakalyptor GUI

Command Line Segmentation

• Umblicius Generation It is highly recommended to use the GUI ("Volume Preprocessing"/"Generate Grid Cells") for this step. If you would like to do it by hand, great care is required.

  Note: To generate an umbilicus.txt for a scroll, make sure to transform the umbilicus coordinates from scroll coordinates x, y, z - where x,y is the tif 2D coordinates and z the tif layer number - into umbilicus coordinates uc with this formula: uc = y + 500, z + 500, x + 500.

• Precomputation Steps: These are the instructions to use ThaumatoAnakalyptor from the command line. The precomputation step is expected to take a few days.

  The Grid Cells used for segmentation have to be in 8um resolution. generate_half_sized_grid.py is used for 4um resolution scans to generate Grid Cells in 8um resolution. If you have access to multiple GPU's, adjust the --num_threads and --gpus flags to speed up the process.

  python3 -m ThaumatoAnakalyptor.generate_half_sized_grid --input_directory <scroll-path>/PHerc0332.volpkg/volumes/20231027191953 --output_directory <scroll-path>/PHerc0332.volpkg/volumes/2dtifs_8um

  python3 -m ThaumatoAnakalyptor.grid_to_pointcloud --base_path "" --volume_subpath "<scroll-path>/PHerc0332.volpkg/volumes/2dtifs_8um_grids" --disk_load_save "" "" --pointcloud_subpath "<scroll-path>/scroll3_surface_points/point_cloud" --num_threads 4 --gpus 1

  python3 -m ThaumatoAnakalyptor.pointcloud_to_instances --path "<scroll-path>/scroll3_surface_points" --dest "<scroll-path>/scroll3_surface_points" --umbilicus_path "<scroll-path>/PHerc0332.volpkg/volumes/umbilicus.txt" --main_drive "" --alternative_ply_drives "" --max_umbilicus_dist -1 --gpus 1

• Segmentation Steps: Additional details for each segmentation step are provided in the instructions document. First, pick a --starting_point. The first time the script Random_Walks.py is run on a new scroll, flag --recompute should be set to 1. This will generate the overlapping graph of the scroll. For subsequent runs, flag --recompute should be set to 0 to speed up the process. Flag --continue_segmentation can be set to 1 if there already is a previous segmentation with the same starting point that you would like to continue.

  python3 -m ThaumatoAnakalyptor.Random_Walks --path "<scroll-path>/scroll3_surface_points/point_cloud_colorized_verso_subvolume_blocks" --starting_point 3113 5163 10920 --sheet_k_range -3 3 --sheet_z_range -10000 40000 --min_steps 16 --min_end_steps 4 --max_nr_walks 300000 --continue_segmentation 0 --recompute 1 --walk_aggregation_threshold 5

  For subsequent continuations of a segmentation, for example:

  python3 -m ThaumatoAnakalyptor.Random_Walks --path "<scroll-path>/scroll3_surface_points/point_cloud_colorized_verso_subvolume_blocks" --starting_point 3113 5163 10920 --sheet_k_range -3 3 --sheet_z_range -10000 40000 --min_steps 16 --min_end_steps 4 --max_nr_walks 300000 --continue_segmentation 1 --recompute 0 --walk_aggregation_threshold 5

• Meshing Steps: When you are happy with the segmentation, the next step is to generate the mesh. This can be done with the following commands:

  python3 -m ThaumatoAnakalyptor.graph_to_mesh --path  <scroll-path>/scroll3_surface_points/point_cloud_colorized_verso_subvolume_blocks --graph 3113_5163_10920/point_cloud_colorized_verso_subvolume_graph_RW_solved.pkl --start_point 3113 5163 10920 --scale_factor 2.0

  The scale_factor depends on the resolution of the scroll scan. For 8um resolution, the scale_factor is 1.0. For 4um resolution, the scale_factor is 2.0.

• Texturing Steps: Rendering is GPU accelerated. First run the following commands:

  export MAX_TILE_SIZE=200000000000

  export OPENCV_IO_MAX_IMAGE_PIXELS=4294967295

  export CV_IO_MAX_IMAGE_PIXELS=4294967295

  To display the rendering process, use the flag --display.

  python3 -m ThaumatoAnakalyptor.large_mesh_to_surface --input_mesh <scroll-path>/scroll3_surface_points/3113_5163_10920/point_cloud_colorized_verso_subvolume_blocks/mesh_flatboi.obj --output_folder <scroll-path>/PHerc0332.volpkg/working_3113_5163_10920 --grid_cell <scroll-path>/PHerc0332.volpkg/volume_grids/20231027191953 --nr_workers 16 --gpus 1 --display 

• Resource Requirements: RTX4090 or equivalent CUDA-enabled GPU with at least 24GB VRAM, 196GB RAM + 250GB swap and a multithreaded CPU with >= 32 threads is required. NVME SSD is recommended for faster processing. Approximately twice the storage space of the initial scroll scan is required for the intermediate data.

Training 3D instance segmentation (advanced)

If you would like to train the 3D instance segmentation model refer to Mask3D and these additional instructions. Make sure to download the provided training data 3d_instance_segmentation_training_data, preprocess the data and place it in the appropriate directories.

Debugging

• 3D Visualization: For debugging and visualization, CloudCompare or a similar 3D tool is recommended.

Disclaimer

• Paths in the script might need adjustment as some are currently set for a specific system configuration.

Known Bugs

• Recto and verso namings are switched.

TODO

• Find and implement better sheet stitching algorithm
• Remove unused/old files

Contribution and Support

• As this software is in active development, users are encouraged to report any encountered issues. I'm happy to help and answer questions.

Happy Segmenting!