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Ask Slashdot: Automated Tool To OCR CCGs Like Magic: the Gathering?

Posted by timothy on from the very-specific-requirements dept.

An anonymous reader writes I buy massive collections of trading card games, Magic:The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon, Weiss Schwarts, Cardfight Vanguard, etc, etc. And I've gotten the process fairly streamlined as far as price checking, grading, sorting, etc. Part of my process involves using higher-quality web cams positioned over the top of the cards which are in a stack. I keep a cam window on the screen to show a larger, brighter version of the card. What I'm wondering: Is there is an OCR solution out there that will look at the same spot on the screen, capture, ocr, dump to clipboard, etc.? I've tried several open source solutions but none of them quite fit my needs. What I'd really like is to be able to hit a hotkey, and have my clipboard populated with the textual data of the graphics in a pre-set x,y window range. All this should be done via a hotkey. I may be asking for a lot, but then again, I'm sure someone out there has had need of this type of set-up before. Anyone have any recommendations?

3 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. ImageMagick by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Grab an OCR system off of https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OCR. Get ImageMagick. Get streamer (package xawtv). Create a script on the order of:

    now=$(date --iso-8601=ns)
    file=$now.png
    outfile=$now-cropped.png
    streamer -c /dev/video0 -b 32 -o $file
    convert $file -crop 40x80+150+120 $outfile
    gocr $outfile > $now.txt
    rm $outfile

    Now create a keyboard shortcut with your window manager to run this script, or open a terminal and get used to pressing up and enter a lot.

    If you're not on Linux, sorry.

    1. Re:ImageMagick by CronoCloud · · Score: 4, Informative

      Or just have it run continously, snapping pictures every 8 seconds or so, then all they have to do is swap cards.

      while true;do
      echo "Preparing to scan new MTG card in 8 seconds"
      for i in `seq 8 -1 1`; do
                      echo $i
                      sleep 1
      done
      now=$(date --iso-8601=ns)
      file=$now.png
      outfile=$now-cropped.png
      streamer -c /dev/video0 -b 32 -o $file
      convert $file -crop 40x80+150+120 $outfile
      gocr $outfile > $now.txt
      rm $outfile
      done

  2. Decked Builder by DarrenBaker · · Score: 5, Informative

    I use it every day. The Android app is phenomenal at picking the right card from the database based on the picture. The only real problem is that it doesn't have all the alternate art versions of cards from older MTG sets. The interface is a bit sloppy on the desktop version, but the recognition is pretty good.