The National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recently published a Federal Register Notice for a national Pill Image Recognition Challenge.
NLM seeks YOUR input in developing high-quality algorithms and software that rank known images of prescription pills in the NLM RxIMAGE database by similarity to consumer-quality images of unknown prescription pills. NLM plans to use the submissions in creating a future software system and Application Programming Interface (API) that can be used in identifying an unknown prescription pill from a photo taken of that pill by a smart phone.
Parties wishing to participate in the Challenge are provided with a training data set.
The submission period for the Challenge is April 4, 2016 to May 31, 2016, with winners to be announced August 1, 2016.
The Challenge will be judged by calculating mean average precision (MAP) on a similar judging data set. The eligible submission with the highest MAP score will be recommended as the first place winner ($25,000), with the second, third, fourth, and fifth best MAPs, respectively being recommended to earn second place ($15,000), third place ($5,000), and two honorable mentions ($2,500 each).
