2010 / HPPC Challenge conceived by Rick Johnson (Cornell) in response to desire by Museum of Modern Art to study Thomas Walther Collection of 20th century photographs.

2011 / Training dataset distributed to teams includes Macro Reflectance Tramsission Imaging and Reflected-light Differential Intereference Contrast Imaging (on MoMA Thomas Walther Collection photos) and Micro Reflectance Tramsission Imaging and Raking Light Photomicrographs (on MoMA Thomas Walther Collection photos and papers from Messier Reference Collection).

2012 / Meeting at SF MoMA results in decision to focus on (i) raking light photomicrographs as sole source of texture image data to use for automated classification of papers and (ii) fabrication of a dataset including images from same sheet of paper, same package of paper, and same surface type of paper.

2013 / Meeting at MoMA with presentations by 4 teams (from University of Wisconisn, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Tilburg University, and Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon) on successful classification of 120-sample dataset of raking light photomicrographs of unexposed silver gelatin photographic papers from the Messier Reference Collection. Decision made to prepare similarly constructed 120-sample dataset of raking light photomicrographs of inkjet papers.

2013 / First conference presentation on automated classification of 120-sample dataset of raking light photomicrographs of unexposed silver gelatin papers at annual AIC meeting.

2013 / First conference presentation on automated classification of 120-sample dataset of raking light photomicrographs of unexposed inkjet papers at International Conference on Digital Printing Technologies NIP 29.

2013 / Website launched containing two 120 sample datasets of raking light photomicrographs, one of silver gelatin papers and the other of inkjet papers, thereby enabling other signal processing researchers to develop their own automated photographic paper texture classification schemes.

2014 / First journal paper noting potential for automated texture similarity matching of photographic papers published in the Journal of the American Institute of Conservation.

2014 / Special session on `Historic Photographic Paper Identification via Textural Similarity Assessment' at Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers filled with papers by participants in the HPPC Challenge.

2014 / Rick Johnson passes the role of coordinator of this project to Andy Klein (WWU) as it expands to include the study of identifying wove paper via textural similarity.