Manipal, August 18, 2020.

Manipal Institute of technology, Manipal, a constituent unit of Manipal academy of Higher Education, Manipal, takes great pride as four students won the Online Hackathon conducted by Exact Sciences US. They bagged the first prize with a cash prize of $2,500 for their solution titled ‘Combating Colon Cancer with PixelWave OCR’ by developing their own custom OCR API.

The winning team, Team PixelWave, consisted of 4 members namely Jithin Sunny of EEE (batch of 2021), Joel Jogy George of ECE (batch of 2019), Aneesh Bose of CSE (batch of 2019) and C Udaya Kumar OF CSE (batch of 2019). The theme for this year being Optical Character Recognition, challenged the participants to analyze the current state of the art, commercially available, off the shelf Optical Character Recognition software system COTS OCR. Teams were encouraged to augment the COTS OCR solutions to bring about maximum processing efficiency. Participants were asked to build a highly accurate OCR solution that takes a manually filled form as input and updates the corresponding entries into digital format. The task was to build solutions using existing framework resulting in a solution that is ready-to-use meeting industrial coding standards.

Sharing his happiness on the big win, Jithin Sunny of ECE (batch of 2021), Manipal Institute of Technology said, “Despite all four of us being at four different corners of the country, we were able to collaborate virtually and efficiently to develop a solution titled ‘ Combating Colon Cancer with PixelWave OCR’. The hackathon which was spread over a span of one month provided the opportunity to explore various existing models for OCR and finally develop our own custom OCR API which provided greater accuracies than any existing solutions for the specific use case.”

Celebrating with them team, Dr. Srikanth Rao, Director, Manipal Institute of Technology said,“We are extremely proud of our students who have won the prestigious hackathon 2020. We encourage our students to participate in such renowned events to provide them with the best exposure. We also encourage them to be creative, innovative and problem solvers to nurture and cultivate better learning experiences.”