TCG Digitizer
Manage your trading cards digitally
CS 426 Senior Projects | Spring 2019
University of Nevada, Reno | CSE Department
- Team 6 -
Brodie Boldt | Christopher Cooper | Ryan Fox | Jared Parks
Instructors: Sergiu Dascalu, Devrin Lee
External Advisor: Erin Keith
Project Trailer
Project Description
Most trading card shops lack a streamlined digital storage solution for logging their entire card inventory. This leads to the problem of shop owners having a disorganized inventory which can cause uncertainty of the actual on-hand cards. Most solutions that already exist, while effective, are limited by several factors. The first is that they are mostly online solutions and are thus hindered by requiring an internet connection to function. The second is that their methods of logging the card data are through manual entry which can be prone to human error and can be time consuming to manage a large number of trading cards.
This project has produced a device comprised of an application coded in C# and a camera in a dock that correctly and consistently reads Magic: The Gathering cards into a local database for inventory management. The camera connects to a computer over USB to transmit the pictures for processing. As the computer receives card images it detects the card inside of the frame and transcribes the text on each card using Optical Character Recognition(OCR). With this information it finds the card in the database or sends back a warning to the user that the card may have been read incorrectly. As each card is scanned they will be added to a list that the user can review and edit before adding cards to the inventory. All of the users cards can then be managed in the searchable inventory where they can search for new cards as well as manage their current stock. And finally all of these features are available without the need for an internet connection, giving users peace of mind even when the network goes down.
The TCG Digitizer optimizes inventory management for card shops, secondary market sellers, and consumers, eliminating human error while at the same time increasing efficiency.
Card Scanning
The TCG Digitizer features an innovative card scanning process where users can capture images of cards rather than manually enter the information. This helps prevent human error and in the long run increases profit by mitigating incorrect inventory entries.
Inventory Management
The user's inventory can be viewed in a searchable user interface where they can add and remove cards as they please. This offers users a the choice of managing their inventory in a more traditional manner if they would rather not scan cards.
Multiple
User Profiles
Managing users/employees is an important part of any business and so the TCG Digitizer includes support for adding multiple user profiles. This allows admins, owners, and managers to see the transaction history of their inventory and which users made changes to it and where.
Offline Access
While there are several trading card inventory solutions on the market today all of them have one limiting factor, they require an internet connection. The TCG Digitizer uses a local database of all the cards in the history of Magic: The Gathering that only needs to be online during initial setup after which all the features of the software will be available without needing any kind of
Meet Team 6
Brodie Boldt
Brodie worked with Jared to help create the back end functionality of the inventory system. He also documented all of the team meetings to help keep things organized and on track during development
Chris Cooper
Computer Science and Engineering
BS in Progress
Chris designed the image and video processing techniques used to capture and process card images. This includes card edge and corner detection, and processes to fix image imperfections. He also was a major contributor in the implementation of optical character recognition technologies, database implementation, and UI development
Ryan Fox
Ryan manages the database and how it is accessed. He created the database query functionality that provides data for the card scanning and for the inventory. He also has a larger role in formatting the user interface for the project.
Jared Parks
Jared helped create the inventory system that the user views and interacts with in the application. Additionally, he worked on various other aspects of the user interface.
Project Related Resources
Problem Domain Book:
The Image Processing Handbook (Sixth Edition)
Author: John C. Russ
Publish date: 7 April 2011
The Image Processing Handbook acts as a reference for various aspects of image processing. In regards to the TCG Digitizer project, the book gives guidance on isolating objects in an image, which is necessary for identifying the text on a card.
Websites useful/related to your project
1. CrystalCommerce - an online application that allows users to store all of their MTG
(Magic: The Gathering) cards into a single location. It also connects with multiple online
markets to find the best price for each card or set of cards so the user can get the best
deal. While intuitive and fast, it is limited by the fact that the user has to manually enter
the information of each of their cards, making it unsuitable for an inventory larger than a
personal collection.
● https://www.crystalcommerce.com/
2. TopDecked - A phone app that allows users to take pictures of MTG cards and store them
in their own digital inventory. TopDecked is limited by the fact that it only exists for
smartphones and uses its own proprietary database for storage.
3. MTGJSON - an online database that holds the data for every released MTG card in
JSON format. The data stored on this website is free to download and will be referenced
when cards are scanned into a user’s inventory in the TCG Digitizer.
Technical reports, conference papers, and/or journal articles
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212827115012019
This scientific article analyzes the increase in efficiency and lower occurrences of error
by implementing an automated inventory system in a warehouse. This also suggests that
improvements in regards to efficiency and error control would be possible for a smaller
business using an improved inventory system (albeit, with less dramatic gains).
2. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/33
418.pdf
This article serves as an overview of the open-source optical character recognition engine
currently sponsored by Google named ‘Tesseract’. The overview covers the software’s
origins, its development history, how it recognizes characters in images, and potential
improvements that may be added in the future.