Automated Card Authentication

[perezfan]

Heritage has extremely high resolution scans as well. They've sold thousands of Goudeys in all grades over the years.

[Case12]

Are you using AI?

[kevinlenane]

Ill take a look at those scans - my email is kevinlenane@gmail.com for Google Docs access. Thank you for the offers - high res scans could work but the best thing is just close up pictures taken on a smart phone and uploaded to the below Google Drive link. There is an example in that google drive folder of the front and back of the cad:

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/f...GxCM13GRpy13B_

To explain a bit more on the image size preference - the general idea is to get the software working such that a general consumer can authenticate a card on their own smartphone device. So to create the best machine vision pipeline - the training data should be around that same resolution (which is sufficient for these purposes) Obviously id like to get my hands on some bulk imagery shot on a smart-phone but i will gladly dig through scans that could be similar size and use them as well if thats more what people have here. Alternatively if a site like VCP stores cards at a similar resolution to smart phone pictures the I would run a web scrape and grab a ton of images en masse - so thanks again for all the suggestions.

If someone out there happens to be sitting on a huge pile of raw Goudeys I would be willing to compensate someone for their time taking pictures of them. Obviously im trying to be somewhat economical in the POC stage given the but the real limiter right now is training data. I may need to come up with some creative ways to get this imagery if web scraping doesnt work - maybe compensating photos with actual cards or some other motivational exercise

[kevinlenane]

A couple of other answers/clarifications - it does seem like most folks have scans here on Net54 but they seem to be generally of their own collection and are of a huge variety of resolutions. I chose smartphone photos as a base as I would assume they are the most readily available and consistent (in terms of resolution) when it really counts which is during a transaction. This would include a purely web transaction and even more so during any in-person transaction as most would have a smartphone on their person to authenticate live.

On the AI question - right now Im just using machine vision and basic blocking and tackling with no real AI/MI. I can see at some point in the future the system being able to identify other card markers using some form of AI and also potentially learning things from comparison between automated grades and numerical grades that this would give out. It could learn new things and significant relationships between authentication and condition as well. If this ever gets to the investment stage lord knows Ill have to talk about AI a lot - but for now its hard enough to just train up the machine vision with screaming kids in the background...

[Jobu]

CardTarget, which is free, also has a lot of scans.

[kevinlenane]

Thanks to all those who replied and reached out - ive managed to collect some imagery but not a ton. Still looking for those collectors with large quantities of Goudey cards/sets that are least in part in raw format. The system will likely work with graded cards as well but the best training data will be of raw images. I will also say that fortunately - for the grading piece - the training data is a bit less crucial and non-set-year specific for the most part.

[JunkyJoe]

It might be challenging, for various reasons, to run the process using digital images (smartphone photos). I think the only fail-proof way to electronically authenticate a card would be to develop a system that uses a 3D scanner to get all sides and edges of the card, with absolutely precise measurements all around.

This would involve the 3D scanning device taking both photos and measurements of the card, and then sending the scanned information to a PC application. The PC application would then process all the measurements and other photo data (common print marks, coloring, fonts, etc) against a database of card attributes for the given set.

Of course, you would need to have the actual card physically available, to be able to place it in the scanner. There are just too many variables involved with using digital images of cards.