Imaging
Our AI has come so far that it doesn’t make sense to do any more work on it before the enemy men can be recognized. Before this can happen however, the camera should calibrate itself automatically. We’ve chosen to do this by attaching little white stickers to the red corners of the table. These are easy to recognize and with a little bit of math, the program will calculate the position of the corners of the actual playing field.
These stickers are only used once on startup – there’s no reason to do this every frame. Especially not since the opponent and spectators might stand in the way of the camera when playing. You can see one of the stickers here:
The next step is to find out where the actual rods are at. This serves two purposes:
- We know at which pixels not to look for the ball. This is important since the rods can easily be very light and be mistaken for the ball.
- We know where to look for the human players.
After this we might want to look into also recognizing the angle of the human players. Also some hardware work needs to be done, and advanced features of the AI can be implemented.