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Tracking cards on a planning board

Pixy Software
#1

A couple of years ago I was given a problem of tracking the position of a index card stuck to a white board. We were using a Kanban project planning system for software development and wanted to be able to tell when a card moves from one part of the board to another.

Each board was 2m wide by 1m high and had around 20 cards that needed tracking. The cards need to be cheap to produce (so no rfid on the cards etc) and the board layout needs to be flexible.

I ran a number of experiments starting with qrcodes and other much simpler code types, using openCV to process the image. If i used a webcam the results were awful but a hi-res image from a SLR with a flash would be able to pick up basic codes. QRcodes were out of the question but that wasn’t a problem. It was not practical to have a SLR with a flash firing every 5mins in the office.

So my question is how good would Pixy be at identifying a colour code at a range of 2-3 meters away?

#2

Hi Toby,

How big are the index cards? About 2x3 inches? Assuming you use bright colors, Pixy should be able to do it with sufficient lighting (you wouldn’t need a flash, just good lighting in the room). The image resolution can be as high as 1280x800 which should be high enough to sufficiently see each card.

Is each card a unique color? If so, you may have some problems there as right now Pixy only supports 7 color signatures. However if you combined the colors to make a color code then you should be fine. We’re still working on finishing up color codes, so we can’t really say how accurate they are at certain distances, but for your application I would think there won’t be a problem.

Good luck!

Scott