Ship or iceberg? $50K prize for best ways to tell the difference

More than a thousand people from around the world are locked in a competition to see if they can come up with a better way to spot icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland.

It was launched by the Centre for Cold Ocean Resource Engineeringand Norwegian energy companyStatoil, whoare looking to crowdsource a better way to identify icebergs drifting towards the Grand Banks, posinga risk to people's lives and oil and gas equipment.

C-COREand Statoil are offering $50,000 US in prizes to whoever can come up with the best ways to identify icebergs on satellite images that contain thousands of different objects, or targets.

The two groups haveposted the the challenge on Kaggle, a Google-owned website where people compete to come up with solutions to a wide range of data problems. This particular challenge is called the Iceberg Classifier Challenge.

"We've got a database of 5,000 targets that we've uploaded to this website and the competition, which has prize money of $50,000, will give people the incentive to look very closely at our database," said Desmond Power,C-CORE'svice-president of remote sensing.

We are absolutely flabbergasted. We were expecting maybe a couple hundredteams.- Desmond Power

To spot icebergs, offshore oil companies use satellite images to visually try to differentiate icebergs from other objects in the ocean such as ships.

While new satellites and other technologieshave improved the process over the years,C-COREandStatoilare looking to find approaches they haven't explored yet.

"The issue is there are lots of things that show up in a satellite image besides icebergs. There are ships and marine life. Sowe need to be able to understand what each target looks like,"saidPower.

"We want to see if there are things that we just aren't seeing, things we might not have tried before," he said.

"By harnessing the brains of over 1,000 people from all around the world for a measly $50,000, we are hoping to do much better and basically give us some new ideas."

Overwhelming response

Power said when they first decided to go ahead with the Kaggle competition, they didn't expect to get so much interest.So when they saw 1,000 teams sign up before they even officially announced it on Tuesday, both C-CORE and Statoil were blown away.

Teams so far have been from all over the world, with many from China, Russiaand Silicon Valley.

Power said the iceberg competition has attracted even more interest than an U.S. government-funded one on airport screening, which has a top prize of half a million dollars.

"We've managed to attract 1,000 teams. We are absolutely flabbergasted. We were expecting maybe a couple hundredteams," Power said.

The deadline for submissions to the competition is Jan. 23.