Automated Card Authentication

[kevinlenane]

So wanted to update the group on my machine vision card authentication project. We've developed some basic algorithms to detect real/fake 1933 Goudey cards based on 7 markers that can detect a real card with extremely high accuracy. As an after-effect it does appear that we can also supply a basic non-biased grade to various components of the card. In short, the problem is very approachable and doable.

The biggest problem I have right now is training data - what I've used (intentionally) thus far have been images taken on my iPhone - since I'd like this to exist in an app. Standard iPhone 10 photos provide plenty of resolution to achieve whats necessary to machine grade - my issue is that I need many images of cards to train the algorithms further and what I've been able to download off the site here is down-compressed significantly and others are in too high resolution to be consistent with the model.

So my question is - how do you think I can best get a high volume and wide variety of 33 Goudey's taken on an iPhone (or even similar quality smartphone). I've considered going into shops and taking pictures of every card I can find but obviously this isnt the most scalable approach. Are there members on here with large raw Goudey collections that have pictures (note that scans aren't necessary but could work depending on the size)? The images are typically 2-3mb in size but I'm just not sure the best way to gather a large volume of unique images. Any advice or suggestions are welcome - no need to post images here since they will likely be compressed in a way that may make them not usable.

Obviously with the card graders shut down the problem is quite timely - so any and all advice is welcome. Thanks in advance.

Kevin Lenane

[kevinlenane]

FWIW - this was the preliminary list of markers we used to start the pipeline - obviously there is more complexity in the actual development process and some additional markers not included around coloring etc. but I thought it might be interesting to see how this particular card set can be evaluated (and also possibly useful as a non-technical document in just evaluating these cards by eye)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...clLf30Ae4/edit

[LuckyLarry]

I've got a near set of raw 1933 Goudey cards and an iPhone 7. How do I get the pictures to you (text or email)? Do you need pictures of the front and back? Individual pictures of each card or can I line up five or six?

Larry

[BabyRuth]

SGC - Skynet Grading Company

[Rhotchkiss]

VCP has a large database of pictures.

Also, most auction houses should have solid scans. Search under prior auctions.

Then once you get the cards on your screen, screen shot them

[x2drich2000]

Maybe I missed something in one of the other threads, but after reading through the linked document is seems the markers used are unique to the set chosen. Are you going to have to come up with a different set of markers for each set? If so, how are you planning to accomplish this on sets where there is not a huge number of samples to draw from?

[kevinlenane]

It's a good question - my plan here is to start narrow and then expand - the rarer the set the more scant the data for sure. It's something that we'd have to expand set by set starting with the cross section of popularity and value.

I will post a Dropbox link if anyone does want to post picture. I really appreciate all the above advice - I'll try to see if the images on VCP and the existing grading companies are large enough to warrant a web scrape...