This week, I spent most of my time meeting with our team and TA’s to refine our project’s scope. We transitioned from two disjoint projects involving a custom RFID poker chip tracker and card imager to a single deliverable: a playing card holder that images and classifies playing cards as they are retrieved by the dealer. We framed the project such that there are clear individual contributions from each member. I will focus primarily on building the imaging system.
Before our design review, I need to quantify the optical and electrical requirements for a camera. We require a camera whose optics provide reasonable resolution photos of the suit and rank within close proximity. We want to avoid fisheye projections that add non-linear transformations to the images; that would make the classifiers more difficult to train. Secondly, I need to determine a lower bound on the framerate based on how fast cards are dealt. Finally, we will tend towards cameras with stable linux drivers.
Before our design review, I will also plan the lighting more concretely. Perhaps we could image a playing card under different color illumination to provide higher-contrast images for different playing cards. As we narrow the scope of the project, we will solve these design questions so Ethan has time to add these hardware changes.
Our group decided to add a hardware switch that triggers when the dealer moves a card over the camera. This will avoid the unnecessary complexity of having the camera determine when a card is being dealt.
We are on schedule to complete our proposal in time, and I will solidify the details above in the coming week.