scrollprize/profilometer

Optical profilometry of opened Herculaneum papyri

Dataset accompanying “Ink detection from surface topography of the Herculaneum papyri”.

The release contains 14 co-registered profilometry regions encompassing 16 letters from PHerc. 248, PHerc. 250, and PHerc. 500P2.

• Native lateral sampling: 0.68793625 µm/pixel in X and Y
• Vertical sensitivity: 8 nm

NOTICE — 3 September 2026: We identified an inconsistency between the lateral sampling recorded in this dataset’s metadata and the value reported in the manuscript. We are investigating the discrepancy and will apply any necessary corrections.

Data

Each sample under data/ has four files with identical dimensions and a top-left origin:

• <sample>.txt: semicolon-delimited X, Y, and calibrated Z values in µm; missing reconstructions are nan
• <sample>_z.tif: per-sample normalized uint16 height map
• <sample>_stack.tif: co-registered RGB brightfield image
• <sample>_label.png: grayscale ink annotation; experiment preprocessing treats nonzero values as foreground

Use the text files when calibrated physical heights are required. Exact height-map preprocessing is specified in configs/experiment.json.

Metadata and configurations

• manifest.csv: dimensions, physical extents, sampling, acquisition dates, and file paths
• configs/case_manifest.json: stable machine-learning case IDs and sample mapping
• configs/sampling.json: native, vertical, and factor-derived sampling values
• configs/experiment.json: preprocessing, experiments, training settings, and software versions
• configs/nnunet/: dataset descriptor and nine resolution-specific nnU-Net plans
• folds/splits_final.json: five cross-validation and three leave-one-papyrus-out splits

License

Data, annotations, folds, and configurations are CC BY-NC 4.0. See LICENSE. Please cite the associated paper above.