A blog about my rantings, including Games, Game Development, Gaming, Consoles, PC Gaming, Role Playing Games, People, Gaming tips & cheats, Game Programming and a plethora of other stuff.
Some progress with the OCR I'm implementing, I've now broken the black and white filtered image down into rows, and then each row into the characters, and then I've looked and analysed where the gaps are between characters and decided where the columns are....
So here we see my pattern matching (simple pattern matching - not a neural network) reading through the characters and building the words for column 1, which is the name of the commodity...
As you can see it is working quite well... I need to keep training the pattern matching weights more, and this is very memory intensive (it takes over 300MB of data to process the various images, sub images, patterns and pixel values I'm summing & weighing against one another).
The biggest stumbling blocks is that the sourcing of the images from the client is very user dependent and twitchy, there are rules for it and ways for the user to capture the image in order and with the best overlap to help the stitching algorithms.
But this is the first pass of this tool, this is for me, to help capture and use market data personally... When I've collected a bunch of such data I may see if there are interested parties in helping collect more and more data.
Until then however, keep yourselves informed by popping back to the blog from time to time, and as ever let me know if you would use a tool like this! Or even sponsor me to develop it further!
Yes this is hot news, Russia has decided that if you're a Transexual or Transgender, which are regarded in society here as normal states or conditions, which people struggle with and which people over come and live perfectly normal lives throughout... But Russia has decided being a chick with a dick, or a bloke wanting a fanny means you can't drive...
I wonder if they'll do away with all the ARM chips they use over there, since Sophie Wilson, the venerable creator of that technology, one of the creators of the BBC Micro in fact would be classified as not being able to drive in Russia (her having been born Roger Wilson).
It just makes me a little bit sick, I've seen video (mostly dashboard cam footage) of Russian traffic accidents, you can see 90% of them include ludicrous idiocy and vodka whilst the other 10% are just Ice & Snow related... Never have I seen a tranny (with or without fanny) crash in one of these videos, but I've seen many skin-head types jump out and brawl, I've seen many farmer looking lumps hiccup and spill empty Vodka bottles over the road.
No, Russia is just getting strange now, and I have to say it reflects the mind of that megalomaniac moron Putin, it really does.
Hey Putin, you're nuts, just for the record.
All this from a Russia conducting a covert War in the Ukraine...
We've all wondered, haven't we, what happens when Jingles releases a new Video?... In this new series I aim to help solve that mystery.... This week, the city of Leeds in the UK
Check back each Friday at 18:30 UK time for the next thrilling instalment, where might we find Jingles being Enjoyed?
Update: Check January 2015 for a series of updates and information about this project - actually working and operating. With our now stitched image, I've performed some research into OCR, online one can post the image below to sites and get OCR reading out of it... Here's the image, and a screen shot of what notepad contains once I open the resulting text.....
Yeah, not very pretty is it... Clearly the colours in the shot affect things.
So I put the image through a new custom filter, taking bright orange in the pixels and making them white but everything else black, this two tone image looks like this...
And it's OCR looks far more useful...
Now I need my own OCR... Hmmm... Lets have some research time.
Update: You can now support this project at Patreon! I've been working on the image stitching & capturing, especially monitoring the keyboard from my program, whilst in the game. So now I can capture a region of the game client window on command.
Once I've captured the different parts of the Market Data (Commodities) screen.... I can stitch them together.
Lets take a look at the pieces and then the result....
Now, each piece is manually captured upon a key press, and then once I know I have enough pieces I manually kick off the stitch... This is the result.
I can now at least store this as the market data for that station, however, this is not perfect. I do have to ensure I don't highlight anything and I do scroll down manually and take each image.
The next step is going to be to name this resultant image for the source station, date & time it, and then process it further, which takes us back to the Grey Scaling and Sobel processing, finally to pass them into OpenCV or whatever I end up with to optically process the data from the image. Here are some other pages captured, which have been put together from various stations...
Yes, this is my first post of the year, I've had some posts scheduled for a while but they were written in 2014, this is the first time I've come to my keyboard to post out to you all in this new spangley fresh year.
So what have I been up to over Christmas, well I'd like to say I've been doing a lot of relaxing, but I've not really... I've been quite stressed with the house sale going on, it's now fixed and finalised for a hand over on the 16th but that means (despite arranging a buyer who wanted to complete before Christmas) we're completing in the New Year and so our ability to spend anything for Christmas has been paralysed, simply because we've been paying two mortgages.
Programming wise, I've done no programming, not a stitch... But this does not mean I've been idle in that area, I've spent an amount of time re-reading my C++11 references and resources, I've watched a couple of the talks given by Bjarne Stroustrop during 2014 and with a lovely gift of an Amazon Voucher I ordered Scott Meyers new book.
Gaming wise, well I had had to reinstall my Windows 7 Machine (my main gaming machine) so I started a new Minecraft world and dug a new base, set up the basic food and cow farming, collected diamonds and then started caving. Settling on a good couple of evenings digging out a bedrock tunnel with a rail-road and supply centre, then set about digging out three tiers of mining tunnels to basically check every block for diamonds and other resources.
All great fun, and it gave me time to re-watch the Lord of the Rings Trilogy whilst playing.
WarThunder had a little love early in the break, but I could not run any Simulator Battles my elderly X45 stick is getting too slack for accurate aircraft handling, I'm considering doing a spring replacement upon it, or just buying a new stick when the house is complete. However, I did jump into a bunch of Arcade and Realistic Battles in the hopes of acing out some units, which I did in both the Japanese and Russian lines. Earning me over a million lions and opening up (I think four) new planes.
Grmlz also gives me hope for bettering my skills with his excellent example of Simulator Flying in the BF109-F1.
DayZ has also been played, I really wish they'd get on and finish that title, they keep saying "it's early access, it's early access", but it's just broken. And whilst ever everyone is paying the £20 odd on steam for early access they have no interest in finishing the game! Rocket has left, the Mod is in better shape than the real game... It's all a mess.
And not a surprise, Rockets departure was expected, the moment he stopped working and started climbing mountains I figured he had too much money or time on his hands, and was riding the gravey train of success and has now jumped ship without completing the job.
Elite Dangerous has also had some time, still a lot of bugs in there, there are some lock ups, some system freezes, and many little AI annoyances, but I'm playing it none-the-less and enjoying it, I may soon be buying a new, nicer, ship besides my Sidewinder & Hauler.
I already own an Eagle, but I have no idea where it is, one can see it in the ship locations, but then getting to that system the GUI doesn't help you locate the ship, and I can't be bothered to fly from station to station to station in a 15 station/landing system just to find a ship I'm not overly interested in at the moment.
I'm making money in Elite taking on the "Go Find Stuff in Space" style missions, and taking out the pirates who jump in on me. With the limited snippets of time I get to play these suit me better than anything else at the moment. And I'm taking on larger fish than many in my very basically kitted out Sidewinder.
My Sidewinder fitting is the base starter set up, everyone starts with this, remove the basic discovery scanner and then add an extra cargo pack (you can get 2 extra and 4 extra slots, just watch your jump range). I flew like this for a while, but found I needed a little more punch in fights against Cobra Mk III vessels, so swapped one of the pulse lasers for a gimballed Cannon.
I easily destroy sidewinders and eagles, I also cope well with Cobra's (my only problem with Cobra's is if they run I can't hit them hard at long range), I have (along with a pair of Security Vessels) taken out an Anaconda in this fitting... That netted me 80,000 odd credits and made my night just last night.
So, new or repair joystick, tweak with new installation a bit more, new C++ book, and at some point more programming... Welcome to my New Year Schedule.
We've all wondered, haven't we, what happens when Jingles releases a new Video?... In this new series I aim to help solve that mystery.... This week, the United States of America
Check back each Friday at 18:30 UK time for the next thrilling instalment, where might we find Jingles being Enjoyed?
