August 10, 2004

10:53 AM

I have a friend who's developing an application that solves a board game via visual recognition of the current state of the board. The image is captured via a webcam, and he's currently in the midst of discovering that the quality of the image (or specifically, the color and white balance) acquired by CMOS-based webcams is just subpar. Can anyone recommend a decent, inexpensive (less than $75, perhaps?) CCD-based webcam?
posted by delfuego to (9 comments total)

Logitech makes a bunch of CCD webcam too. I think the Orbit and the new QuickCam Notebook are both CCD based cameras.
posted by riffola at 11:04 AM on August 10, 2004

This game would happen to be GO, would it?
posted by leotrotsky at 11:23 AM on August 10, 2004

Go? With Go you needn't care about colour balance, even greyscale would be fine. I'm pretty sure you could capture a 19x19 go board with even the crappiest 320x200 webcam with proper camera positioning.

Not to mention that the term "solve" would be a bit overly optimistic, given the current state of computer Go.
posted by fvw at 11:32 AM on August 10, 2004

The Logitech cams that I've seen run about $100 when there's a CCD involved, alas.

And the game is Robot Ricochet, if I recall correctly. It's an aweseme application, actually, and now just needs a good camera!
posted by delfuego at 11:37 AM on August 10, 2004

You reminded me of step 5 in the "Problems Solved" section of the Lego CubeSolver - "Establishing the initial (unsolved) state of the cube" [via a cam].
posted by gluechunk at 11:38 AM on August 10, 2004

well, that's what get for skimming the question

...but *threadjack* Go would lend itself to a board assessment based upon say, color density in different regions of the board, the kind of holistic assessment that is crucial to good gameplay, and which is far more difficult to acquire by standard search-tree approaches */threadjack*
posted by leotrotsky at 12:30 PM on August 10, 2004

$62.95, I can't vouch for the site, but I found it via pricewatch.
posted by riffola at 2:10 PM on August 10, 2004

Get a used Creative PC-Cam 600 or higher.
posted by skallas at 4:09 PM on August 10, 2004

Never let it be said that I'm not happy to facilitate threadjackings.

Colour density isn't going to get you anywhere in Go apart from in carefully selected (and reasonably rare past the game opening) cases; Influence does work in large fuzzy blobs, but the vitality of groups (or the cost of achieving it) depends too much on the details.

Not to mention that actually doing such algorithms in hardware would be utterly pointless and probably get you a large grant at some AI institute (no, I'm not bitter about people doing pointless and academically entirely uninteresting things getting my grant money. Well, not very anyway).
posted by fvw at 7:38 PM on August 10, 2004