Automated Card Grading - Surface

[kevinlenane]

fingerprint.jpg

For anyone following along with my efforts to build a machine vision based grading, authentication and provenance company - we are currently crossing what i think is probably the last milestone before we can demo a real proof of concept. Grading corners, edges and centering is pretty straightforward - its the surface grades that wind up requiring the most training data and are the most challenging for a variety of reasons - mostly relating to how to create a perfect "mask" to compare all other "submitted"/scanned cards to.

We are pretty close to finishing a generic solution for this piece but we also checked another box in that in this process - by detecting that there is ample data to fingerprint a card image to mark and measure it for any alteration. When the alteration news really hit the forums - folks were utilizing a few obvious print marks and stains but the reality that is visible to pixel analysis is much bigger - once we figured out how to normalize what that perfect mask looked like - each and every card quite literally had a finger print. Anyway, this alone would be super useful to any grading effort - ive attached an image of an actual card and its departures from the "perfect version" - just thought folks here might find this extremely reliable feature interesting as guard against trimming and other alteration including any color changes which the machine sees as changes in pixel color.