Abstract：The national library of medicine pill image recognition challengeAn initial report In January 2017 the USNational Library of Medicine announced a challenge competition calling for the development and discovery of high-quality algorithms and software that rank how well consumer images of prescription pills match reference images of pi Institutional CollectionThis is related to the USNational Library of Medicine but focuses primarily on medical and drug identification rather than traditional library applicationsThis article describes a challenge aimed at discovering and developing high-quality algorithms and software for ranking the similarity between consumer tablet images and their reference tablet images in the authoritative RxIMAGE collectionThe main motivation for this challenge is to facilitate the easy identification of unknown prescription tablets by healthcare professionals and the general publicThis requires utilizing pattern recognition technology to compare and rank the similarity between consumer images and reference images