Pattern recogntion - Magic the Gathering Card

Question

I am hoping to create a program on my android (and/or more likely back at the server) to use the camera on the phone to capture an image of the card and break it into the corresponding parts and use them to identify the card to use in a database of my own creation. The pattern recognition is where I could use help. Ok, a card has a black border, a "box" at the top with the name of the card, an image, a box with the type of the card and a symbol that represents the set it was from, and a final box with some more descriptive text. To start with, I will assume all cards follow that format. Ok, at the least to identify that card, I need to identify the top box and OCR the typed text. If I could match the symbol in the middle box that would be great, but ..

Can anyone point me to either an API or article/book on the theory I would need to code it myself?

Answer 1

I depends if you really want to know the border-color & set.

Because if you don't you don't really need a tool to recognise an image of the entire card. You just need to OCR the card name.

You could do this using a API like this one:

OCR-IT OCR Cloud 2.0 API offers a commercial-grade high-quality free light use OCR API without an expiration date. It is popular with university projects and prototyping of applications that eventually may switch to larger paid subscriptions, but it can be used for implementations that require on-going OCR use. This is probably as close as one can come to a free OCR API that can handle poor quality images and complex multilingual text.