5 ms·

Histogramo – Dice Statistics on Demand

6 points by DanielBank 4y ago

gus_massa 4y ago
The landing page has too little information, so I'd copy the description in the Google store for you: > Detect dice rolls with your camera and track the statistics of your dice games. Histogramo runs offline: no internet connection is required and camera data stays on your device. Please consider buying Histogramo Pro for the ability to save historical game data. Here sometimes it's easier to get traction with a technical post. Do you have an interesting technical anecdote to write about? Which model of dice are harder to detect? White or transparent? White dice on a white table? Small single dot for 1 or big single dot or custom drawing? L or R dices? Do you detect only D6, or also D4, D8, D12 and D20?
- DanielBank 4y ago
  Thank you for the advice (I'm new to this). The model performs better with a dark background, for example white dice on a wood table. I trained it with different colors of dice in the hopes that that would help it generalize. The model also performs better with top-down images of dice. I did train with a lot of oblique angles of dice (3000 images in total). That helped somewhat but it is still far from ideal. The model currently recognizes a standard D6 dice with pips. I made a separate model that recognizes D6 and the boat / castle die from Catan: Cities and Knights. That model is only used with the associated game type. Classifying dice rolls is an interesting problem to me because the same "orientation" of the die might translate into different results of what is the actual value. The model has no concept of what "up" is. The oblique angles issue also adds complexity. In my current approach, I opted to train the model to recognize an entire die. Another thought I had was to train it to recognize the individual faces as well as the tabletop. Then if I could find the face that was furthest away from the tabletop, I could predict that as the value. One last problem which I haven't solved yet is the concept of re-rolls. The detection is somewhat simplistic in that it looks for N consecutive rolls with the same result. It requires an empty frame where nothing is detected to "prime" the detector for the next roll. This was done because I didn't want the detector to redundantly record the same image of dice as multiple rolls. I drew a lot of inspiration for this project from the following tutorial: https://github.com/nell-byler/dice_detection https://github.com/nell-byler/dice_detection. Nell also has a Dice Dataset on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/nellbyler/d6-dice https://www.kaggle.com/nellbyler/d6-dice
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    As the other comment says, you should copy the description in the landing page, and also add a few screenshots. It essentially duplicates the information in the page is Google Play, but not everybody clicks in the bottom to go to Google Play. Many (most?) persons just click the back button and forget your project.
    - DanielBank 4y ago
      Thank you again! I updated the website to at least have the hook from Google Play and the screenshots.
jonnycomputer 4y ago
Not everyone reading HN is on a phone, or is going to be willing to rush to install an app. Sell it, man.
JellyBeanThief 4y ago
Yep, that sure is a nice icon.
- DanielBank 4y ago
  I liked it too. It was designed by https://www.fiverr.com/design_desk/ https://www.fiverr.com/design_desk/

6 points by DanielBank 4y ago

The landing page has too little information, so I'd copy the description in the Google store for you: > Detect dice rolls with your camera and track the statistics of your dice games. Histogramo runs offline: no internet connection is required and camera data stays on your device. Please consider buying Histogramo Pro for the ability to save historical game data. Here sometimes it's easier to get traction with a technical post. Do you have an interesting technical anecdote to write about? Which model of dice are harder to detect? White or transparent? White dice on a white table? Small single dot for 1 or big single dot or custom drawing? L or R dices? Do you detect only D6, or also D4, D8, D12 and D20?

DanielBank 4y ago
Thank you for the advice (I'm new to this). The model performs better with a dark background, for example white dice on a wood table. I trained it with different colors of dice in the hopes that that would help it generalize. The model also performs better with top-down images of dice. I did train with a lot of oblique angles of dice (3000 images in total). That helped somewhat but it is still far from ideal. The model currently recognizes a standard D6 dice with pips. I made a separate model that recognizes D6 and the boat / castle die from Catan: Cities and Knights. That model is only used with the associated game type. Classifying dice rolls is an interesting problem to me because the same "orientation" of the die might translate into different results of what is the actual value. The model has no concept of what "up" is. The oblique angles issue also adds complexity. In my current approach, I opted to train the model to recognize an entire die. Another thought I had was to train it to recognize the individual faces as well as the tabletop. Then if I could find the face that was furthest away from the tabletop, I could predict that as the value. One last problem which I haven't solved yet is the concept of re-rolls. The detection is somewhat simplistic in that it looks for N consecutive rolls with the same result. It requires an empty frame where nothing is detected to "prime" the detector for the next roll. This was done because I didn't want the detector to redundantly record the same image of dice as multiple rolls. I drew a lot of inspiration for this project from the following tutorial: https://github.com/nell-byler/dice_detection https://github.com/nell-byler/dice_detection. Nell also has a Dice Dataset on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/nellbyler/d6-dice https://www.kaggle.com/nellbyler/d6-dice
- gus_massa 4y ago
  As the other comment says, you should copy the description in the landing page, and also add a few screenshots. It essentially duplicates the information in the page is Google Play, but not everybody clicks in the bottom to go to Google Play. Many (most?) persons just click the back button and forget your project.
  - DanielBank 4y ago
    Thank you again! I updated the website to at least have the hook from Google Play and the screenshots.

jonnycomputer 4y ago

Not everyone reading HN is on a phone, or is going to be willing to rush to install an app. Sell it, man.

JellyBeanThief 4y ago

Yep, that sure is a nice icon.

DanielBank 4y ago
I liked it too. It was designed by https://www.fiverr.com/design_desk/ https://www.fiverr.com/design_desk/