Gizmosmith

More on recognizing Magic cards

Computer vision is hard.

I have code written that detects edges in a video image, picks pairs of edges that are both within a certain ratio of lengths relative to each other and within a specific angle of each other. I’ll post the code up once I have pushing to my github account set up correctly. It’s actually pretty poor at locating cards in a video image, but it is a demo of how to use some of the UI and feature recognition stuff from OpenCV.

From here, I have a few ideas about how to proceed. The first is to have the program display a rectangle and ask the user to align the card to that rectangle. This means the program will not have to find the card in the image, and can focus on recognizing parts of the image. This will use template-based recognition to pick out mana symbols, and should be pretty simple. The classifier that tries to pick out colors will be even easier, as it will just select a sample region, blur it, and match it to precomputed colors. This can be calibrated for specific lighting conditions for each run.

An even less hands-on approach was suggested by my co-worker Eric. The cards could be displayed by a machine that essentially deals one card at a time. The machine would have a magazine of cards, and would photograph a card, deal it into a hopper, photograph the next card, and so forth, until it was empty. This would have the problem that it wouldn’t be something anyone could download and use, as it would require a special card-handling machine, but the software end would be compatible with the user-based registration approach described above, so someone with a lot of patience could use the manual method.

Another approach would be to throw all the cards on a flatbed scanner (possibly with a funny-colored (e.g. red) bed lid, do template matching to locate card borders, and then segment the images based on that. An ADF scanner with a business card attachment could probably also make short work of a modestly-sized set of cards.