Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Hybrid V3 Progress

Development of the Hybrid V3 roulette computer is progressing very well (www.hybridroulettecomputer.com). The automated detection of the wheel in video, and automated prediction process is extremely complicated - especially since the angle of the video will vary, footage shakes, converting 60 frames per second video and ball position to precise timings etc.

One of the most challenging parts is for the computer to identify and track a particular wheel, and this part is now done.
In the player only forum private areas (www.genuinewinner.com/forum) I've published a video demo of the Hybrid V3 tracking a wheel in a video. It demonstrates:
  • How the wheel is selected and tracked: Importantly for the tracking, I selected a wheel in the far background and NOT the one right in front of the camera bearer (to make it much more difficult) and still you see it is easily tracked. The spins from the far back wheel can comfortably be predicted with a suitable video resolution.
  • How the computer knows if an object moves in front of the wheel: You can plainly see when the person moves in front of the wheel, the computer knows this and keeps the detection box in place. In such a situation, the camera-bearing player can easily step around the person as needed because the computer automatically learns what the wheel looks like from multiple angles. There is no need to aim the camera, and as you can see from the video, even a distant wheel which appears small in the video is easily tracked. This is a significant improvement on earlier models.
While this development is completed sooner than expected, there is still an enormous amount of work to be done. Now that the wheel position can be tracked, the computer needs to observe inside the wheel detection area to track the actual ball and rotor speed. This is actually easier than what is done in the video demo especially as we can use programming source code from earlier versions.

Nevertheless, the actual hardware requires a lot of development to make it small enough to be bodyworn. Overall, I expect full completion in 3-4 months.