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

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?

Comments

Image Database

[Anonymous Coward]

A different method would be to have frames from the webcam be compared to a database of images and tally the matches. Space bar could serve as the "capture and compare image" function. Similar to http://www.tineye.com but local and with a limited data set.

Re:Image Database

[Anonymous Coward]

And, as a bonus, that has application has already been done specifically for MTG cards. e.g. https://github.com/tenderlove/magic_scan

Re:Image Database

[hjf]

This is what I did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Tineye or similar?

[retchdog]

uh, you're thinking of cryptographic/non-invertible/fast-mixing/whatever hashes specifically. it's not exactly defined what a hash is, but generally it means a possibly many-to-one (i.e. lossy) function of data, usually with outputs of fixed (or parametrizable) size.

for example, an OCR is a hash; it (ideally) hashes images of arbitrary dimension into an output space of characters according to which one it most resembles; similarly for any other image recognizer.