pasky wrote:Hi! A student of mine, Tomas Musil, has created open source Go board optical recognition software that seems pretty nicely usable. We have focused on completely automatic runs, so it automatically detects the board corners and then the stones on the board. You can find it at http://tomasm.cz/imago together with a lot of pictures, documentation and bachelor thesis describing the algorithms in detail.
Hi Pasky and all!
Musil's work is remarkable indeed. I and my fellow colleague, prof. Mario Corsolini, studied the thesis and found it of the greatest interest, both on the theoretical side and the practical one. BTW, Musil seems to believe that "we have not found any other work that we can meaningfully compare our results with"; but since november 2012 we have developed and distributed PhotoKifu, a program aimed to reconstruct whole Go games by means of a series of photograph. We're now releasing version 2.1 (a paper is also in progress) and are working on version 2.5, which will implement Open CV instead of the external (and slow) suite Image Magick. We're also working on VideoKifu, a program that will reconstruct a game from a live video feed; we could not develop VideoKifu before because of the slow Image Magick suite, but Open CV will allow that.
At the moment (version 2.1) we achieve on single pictures the same - very good - results Musil got, and take 1 to 4 seconds for picture depending on its size. But our program is optimized for whole games, for which we have 100% stones recognition, even in the presence of hands and whole arms between the camera and the goban (of course the stones we're looking for must still be visible), given the pictures are not too small (I estimate at least 1024 x 768). That requires about 1/10 of second for each picture plus image optimization either by Image Magick or Open CV.
Of course, we too are interested in EGC 2015. We hoped to attend the scientific conference at EGC 2013, but could not find reliable informations. Maybe Musil will now be able to contact EGC 2015's organizers and catch their interest: it would be a remarkable feat if we could both go and talk about (and, of course, demonstrate) two programs making use of different approaches. For the moment we're planning to do such a thing during the big international Pisa tournament at the beginning of March, but the EGC 2015 would be the ideal stage.
Let us know if you're interested, of course!
mr. Andrea Carta, BSc(IT)
