OpenCv and finding rectangles

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Programming, Research - October 8, 2011 - 0 Comment

I have been working, on and off, on a computer vision application that will recognize a card from a certain game in an image, figure out what the card is, and add it to a database. I had some luck in earlier versions of the code looking for template matches to try to find distinctive card elements, but that fails if the card is scaled or skewed, and it rapidly becomes too processor-heavy if there are many templates to match. Recently, at work, I have had even more opportunity to play with OpenCV (a computer vision library), and have found a few blogs and tricks that might help me out.

The first blog shows how to pick out a Sudoku puzzle from a picture. The most important part is finding the corners of the puzzle, as after that, it can be mapped to a square with a perspective transform. I can do a similar trick, only I’ll be mapping to a rectangle. Since corner-finding is kind of scale-invariant (the corner of something is a corner at any scale), this will let me track a card pretty easily.

I think that I can actually use OpenCV’s contour finding to get most of the edges of the card, and then the Hough transform to get the corner points. I may even be able to get away with using just contour finding, getting the bounding rectangle of each contour, and checking that it has something like the proper aspect ratio. This will work in the presence of cards that are rotated, but fails on perspective-related skewing.

This StackOverflow post has a nice approach to getting the corners of a rectangle that has some rotation and perspective skew.

Once I have the card located, I’m going to throw a cascade of classifiers at it and try something like AdaBoost to get a good idea of which card it is. Some of the classifiers are simple, things like determining the color of the front of the card. Others may actually pull in a bit of OCR or template-based image recognition on (tiny) subsections of the card. Since I will actually know the card border at this point, I can scale the templates to match the card, and get solid matches fast.