A Case Study on Logging Visual Activities: Chess Game

Automatically recognizing and analyzing visual activities in complex environments is a challenging and open-ended problem. In this thesis this problem domain is visited in a chess game scenario where the rules, actions and the environment are well defined. The purpose here is to detect and observe a FIDE (Fédération International des Échecs) compatible chess board and to generate a log file of the moves made by human players. A series of basic image processing operations have been applied to perform the desired task. The first step of automatically detecting a chess board is followed by locating the positions of the pieces. After the initial setup is established every move made by a player is automatically detected and verified. A PC-CAM connected to a PC is used to acquire images and implement the corresponding software. For convenience, “Intel R © Open Source Computer Vision Library (OpenCV)” is used in the current software implementation.