The Pauline Pace Program Discussion Thread

[John73]

Thanks for the explanations and points of view Jeff.

I think I might have a quick go and writing a very basic "Pauline inspired" Android app though.   I'll release details and a link if I get it going.   Unfortunately I can't do it for iOS atm, as Apple want to charge a ridiculous price for a developer license which I'm not going to pay for an App I won't make any money off

[ChrisP]

I would definitely like to see some sort of option for manual input, where very little input is necessary.

This would be great for spectacting.

It would be cool to open up a stream of a game in progress and to be able to punch in the current score and level and to get an accurate idea of the player's pace.

I see three inputs, something like:

1. L1-L4 Start: ______
OR (if the start score is unknown, you could click one of several estimated values, based on the player, etc.)
Estimated Start:   
   Low (100K)
   Medium (115K)
   High (130K)

2. Current Score: _______
3. Current Screen: __ __

And from those inputs the program would spit out the following:

Level Avg: __________
Pace:   
   At Current Average: _________
   Low 1-hammer (44K/L): ________
   Moderate 1-hammer (47K/L): _______
   High 1-hammer/Low 2-hammer (50K/L): _______
   Moderate 2-hammer (55K/L): _______
   Extreme Pressing (62K/L): _______

Something like that.

At the moment, I use an Excel spreadsheet to do this, but it's a tad unwieldy and an app would be better.

This is much like how my GPS (at least it claims to) learn my driving habits and give me a better estimate of my ETA. 

funspit

[Jeffw]

I want to do some experimenting with automating score input on arcade. I would like a few different arcade streamers to send me a video of one of your sessions or part of a session that was recorded directly from the webcam (i.e., not a twitch stream archive). The reason is that Pauline will have direct access to the webcam which should allow for higher quality images than those from something like a twitch archive. I would like to get a good variety of videos with different webcams and different setups, so even if you don't have a perfect streaming setup with the webcam pointed directly at the screen, you should still send a video (in fact, I might be more interested in these lower quality streaming setups). The video itself should have image quality as high quality as possible, with frame rate being much less important than image quality. The preferred video format is AVI. If you can't send a video even screenshots taken from the webcam would be helpful. You can either post videos/screenshots in this thread or PM them to me.

[hchien]

Next time I stream, I'll record directly from the webcam. 

This would be awesome!

[danman123456]

But the webcam will be in use by OBS or Xsplit so how will you access it exactly? I think its awesome idea and cant wait just wanted to point that out I have all kinds of issues with skype/xsplit with "Webcam is in use"

Dan

[Scoundrl]

I have a good sample from my stream, Ross's 1,136,700. There are actually two stream going in the video giving effectvly two good data sets.

Download the FLV in zip format here...

http://www.athometech.com/files/DK1136700.zip

-Ken

[hchien]

Edit: disregard prior comment... realized Dan was talking to Jeff, not me.

[Jeffw]

But the webcam will be in use by OBS or Xsplit so how will you access it exactly? I think its awesome idea and cant wait just wanted to point that out I have all kinds of issues with skype/xsplit with "Webcam is in use"

Dan

You might have to use something like manycam or splitcam, which allow the webcam to be used by multiple applications at once. It's kind of unfortunate that this would be required since it adds a step to run Pauline on arcade, but I'm not sure that there is any better solution. I'll look into this more later once Pauline can actually work on arcade to see if there is a better solution.

[danman123456]

Sweet I'd still do it if it works. I miss pauline

But the webcam will be in use by OBS or Xsplit so how will you access it exactly? I think its awesome idea and cant wait just wanted to point that out I have all kinds of issues with skype/xsplit with "Webcam is in use"

Dan

You might have to use something like manycam or splitcam, which allow the webcam to be used by multiple applications at once. It's kind of unfortunate that this would be required since it adds a step to run Pauline on arcade, but I'm not sure that there is any better solution. I'll look into this more later once Pauline can actually work on arcade to see if there is a better solution.

[Jeffw]

So I've attempted to train Tesseract, the OCR engine used by Pauline, for the DK font. This was done to make reading the score on arcade easier, and also to improve accuracy on MAME. At the moment it's not clear whether the training has offered any improvement for accuracy on arcade, and I want to know if it improved MAME accuracy at all. I know that Pauline was reading the score wrong for a few people and I would like to know if the training fixes that. So if you are one of those people who were having problems, can you download this attached file, eng.traineddata, and put it in the tessdata directory of Pauline, replacing the existing eng.traineddata file and see if it improves at all, and let me know the results.

[d3scride]

I was having a few minor issues with it: not displaying points from deaths and on occasion over inflated barrel board screen scores .Might have something to do with the points from death carrying over into the total for the board. I'll grab the attachment when I get home from work. Thanks Jeff!

[Milehighdt]

I've done a few tests and the new eng.traineddata file has worked flawlessly. The old file would miss identify many of the digits on my screen. Great work !

[syscrusher]

Nice, Jeff!  I was just reading about how to train tesseract for the DK font the other day.  Pauline doesn't read some digits correctly for me and I've noticed others having the same problem.  I've tried using tessercat for .NET and I couldn't get consistent results with it even after some preprocessing of the image.  I'm using Asprise OCR right now and it works perfectly.  I'll give the new file a test.

[Jeffw]

I've done a few tests and the new eng.traineddata file has worked flawlessly. The old file would miss identify many of the digits on my screen. Great work !

That's good to hear. Hopefully I can get some results from a few other people as well to make sure this new file works better. It seems that on arcade this new file causes worse performance than the default file. I've reached near-perfect OCR accuracy for arcade on my test video using image pre-processing,  but only with the default eng.traineddata; the new one still provides pretty good accuracy but not as good as the default. It's probably because the font I created to train Tesseract doesn't take into account the glow that happens on arcade, where pixels light up surrounding pixels and make things like the hole in the middle of the 4 difficult to see.

[Jeffw]

Can I get any more people to send me a video? I've received one video from Hank that had a high enough resolution for score reading to be successful. Ken's video, while useful for testing things like the score location and orientation detection algorithm, was too low resolution to accurately read the score, even with image preprocessing. The video doesn't need to be long, about 30 minutes should be fine, but it should be high resolution, ideally the maximum resolution that your webcam supports. This is because when Pauline is running on arcade it will be able to select the maximum resolution supported by the webcam and take images of that resolution.