This week, I primarily worked on the character recognition software. After some research, I found it was likely the best to first run some preprocessing to convert the image to black and white, then isolate and draw onto the original image the contours of each character for better performance of the OCR. Currently, most characters are able to be recognized, but some without curves (L, T, I, etc) are proving more difficult. I plan to further tune some of the preprocessing and contour recognition to improve this. Once the individual characters are identified, I will work on the logic to build adjacent characters into words and eventually map them to the board for score calculation. Additionally, I assisted my team with the design report.
Jolie’s Status Report for 10/5
This week, I began coding some of the hint module. In the paper which we are basing the algorithm off of, they use something called cross-checks (possible letters that can fit in a word vertically if a horizontal word is played and vice versa), and I wrote a function that takes in the state of the board and updates the cross check set for each square. I also wrote a function to find anchor squares (empty squares directly adjacent to filled squares), which will be a starting place for word generation.
I got the Raspberry Pi camera set up and took a picture of our Scrabble board to start with initial testing with our cv. It was hard to get a great angle with the Pi camera so making some sort of intermediary rig might be helpful for the future. Here are the pictures I took:
Denis’s Status Report for 10/5
This week I researched the specific RPi models and LCD screens that we should use for our project. I also began looking into the MQTT protocol and how that can be implemented on the RPis. This upcoming week, I plan on beginning to interface and send data between 2 RPis as well as beginning to create an interface that we’ll be able to use on the LCD screens. My plan is to create a mock-up for what we want the screens to look like, and ensure that we can receive an input from the touch screen. We are on pace for our project.
Cody’s Status Report for 10/5
This week, I gave our design presentation. I also helped Jolie setup the RPi and spent some time figuring out how to use the camera. Additionally, I began working with some of the Pytesseract functions, and I expect image_to_data to be particularly useful, as this returns (among other things) the location of the recognized letters. I’m still not completely sure how I’ll map the words onto the slots on the board, but feedback from the design presentation may provide some insight. The idea of color recognition was proposed, although I feel this could have some difficulties, since that might require onboarding an additional CV library, and the colored grids could be covered by tiles anyway.
Team Status Report for 10/5
We gave our design presentation this week and started working with some of the hardware we plan to use, namely the Raspberry Pi. We found out the camera is not compatible with the RPi 5, so we switched to the RPi 4, which should be sufficient. Outside of setting up some of the dependencies and cloning the git repo onto the Pi, we also began familiarizing ourselves with the software libraries we plan to use, but we are open to changes based on the feedback we receive from our design presentation.