How to run this

I didn't structure this piece of code to run on computers other than my own. It has a bunch of hardcoded directory paths and requires you to get a dataset from somewhere. I'll try to document some of the things you'd need in order to run this.

This assumes you've watched my rustconf 2021 talk [peertube] [youtube].

1. cargo build

After cloning the repo, cargo build should work fine. There are three relevant bins: cache-dataset, photo-detect and video-detect. You'll probably need to change some paths to make them suit your needs, but it should build successfully.

If you're not using Linux, this may not compile due to the v4l dependency. This is necessary to use video-detect, but if you just want to do the photo detection instead of video, you can remove this dependency and ignore errors when building (or just remove) src/bin/video-detect.rs.

2. card image dataset

The code assumes that you have all the card images in the directory dataset/, in jpg format. You can get them from pkmncards.com or pokemontcg.io or some other source. There is a restriction on the image dimensions, mine are all 600x825.

You also need a file named cardback.jpg (mine is 585x819) in the root directory of the project.

3. set icon templates

The base detection algorithm is not able to tell apart two similar cards from two different sets, so I've added a second step where the set symbol is extracted from the photo and compared with a bunch of set symbol templates.

These are templates are not provided, and they're not easy to create, so the easiest way to make this run is to edit the load_templates function in src/lib.rs and make it return an empty Vec instead of what it currently returns.

4. generate cached hashes

The base algorithm uses a perceptual hash to compare images. this is somewhat expensive to calculate, so the detection programs assume a cache file dataset.txt exists.

To generate this cache, run cargo run --bin cache-dataset.

5. create an output directory

The photo-detect program writes files to the output/ directory, so you should create it before running it: mkdir output.

6. run photo-detect

This program takes a bunch of 1920x1080 photos (you need to use this resolution), analyses them, and writes a bunch of debug images to the output/ directory (including a copy of the best three matches found in the dataset).

It reads the photos from the directory images/canon-1080p/. You can change this in src/bin/photo-detect.rs and recompile it.

7. run video-detect

This program reads frames from a camera and analyses them. It assumes that the camera has a resolution of 1920x1080. It also assumes the camera is available on /dev/video3 (v4l::Device::new(3)).

It displays the detection on an iced GUI and it also prints the matches to stdout.