I’ve been working on this project in my spare time for about three weeks and even though is not yet completed I decided it was time to share something. The idea was to realize a robot that could play Ruzzle versus an human player leaving him no possiblity to win. After a few days of brainstorming I decided to start writing a little of code in Python: In a few hours I managed to obtain all the right words performing a depth-first search and comparing them with a dictionary but I felt that was not enough so I asked myself: Why not use OpenCV for image processing combined to Tesseract for letter recognition ?
The first step was to isolate the smartphone’s screen: as the outermost frame of Ruzzle is blue, I decided to convert the image to HSV in order to perform a better filtering. Using OpenCV is quite simple to achieve that:
import cv2 import numpy as np .. BLUE_MIN = np.array([90, 150, 50],np.uint8) BLUE_MAX = np.array([110, 255, 255],np.uint8) hsv = cv2.cvtColor(image,cv2.COLOR_BGR2HSV) threshed = cv2.inRange(hsv, BLUE_MIN, BLUE_MAX)
Using the inRange function we only take care of the pixel which values are in range between BLUE_MIN and BLUE_MAX making easily to find the screen edges. The following code snippet looks for the square with the biggest ares which is, in our case, the screen perimeter.
contours, hierarchy = cv2.findContours(threshed,cv2.RETR_TREE,cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE) max_area=0 max_square=None for cnt in contours: appr=cv2.approxPolyDP(cnt,0.08*cv2.arcLength(cnt,True),True) if len(appr)==4 and cv2.contourArea(appr)>20000 and cv2.contourArea(appr)max_area: max_area=cv2.contourArea(appr) max_square=appr
After computing the transform matrix we can finally apply a perspective transformation to crop the warped image
approx=rectify(a) h = np.array([ [0,0],[319,0],[319,459],[0,459] ],np.float32) transform = cv2.getPerspectiveTransform(approx,h) warp = cv2.warpPerspective(original,transform,(320,460))
Now we can finally crop out the character to feed Tesseract. I found Tesseract to be very inaccurate if the images present some sort of noise or unexpected shapes so I had to find the bounding rectangle of every char and add an outside border in order to let the OCR motor to recognize them with great accuracy.
SIDE=66 SPACING=10 BORDER=5 TOP_LEFT=(123,9) for i in range(4): ii=TOP_LEFT[0]+((SIDE+SPACING)*i) for j in range(4): jj=TOP_LEFT[1]+((SIDE+SPACING)*j) image=img[ii+BORDER:ii+SIDE-BORDER,jj+BORDER:jj+SIDE-BORDER] thresh=np.copy(image) thresh = cv2.adaptiveThreshold(thresh,255,1,1,11,2) contours = cv2.findContours(thresh,cv2.RETR_TREE,cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)[0] maxarea=0 char=None for cnt in contours: approx = cv2.approxPolyDP(cnt,0.001*cv2.arcLength(cnt,True),True) if cv2.contourArea(approx)>maxarea: maxarea=cv2.contourArea(approx) char=approx x,y,w,h = cv2.boundingRect(char) resized=image[y:y+h,x:x+h] res = cv2.copyMakeBorder(resized,20,20,20,20,cv2.BORDER_CONSTANT,resized,(255,255,255)) letters.append(res)
Really nice work
Greeting,
Federico
Thank you Federico !
Bravissimo!