Elite Galaxy Online v1.2 - Advanced Discovery Scanner

[Commander Wolzan]

Hi Commanders,

Elite Galaxy Online v1.2 is now live and includes a new feature - the advanced discovery scanner.

The idea behind the scanner is that rather than having to manually type in all of the data for your discoveries, instead you can simply upload a screenshot of the System View and the scanner will read all the data in automatically using optical character recognition.

Here's the scanner in action

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDUUb6rm2f8

For optimal results, its best to use screenshots around 1920*1080 if possible as the lower the resolution gets, more errors will start to creep in. Once you've performed a scan though you get the opportunity to correct any errors before submitting the discovery.

Its not perfect and there may be a few bugs but it's come together pretty well and definitely adds to the site.

You can have a look at the new scanner over at www.elitegalaxyonline.com

Cheers
Commander Wolzan

 

[CMDR Ulrick]

This is so bad-ass. Will you ever reveal how you did the OCR for the system view? I've been wanting to incorporate something like this into a personal project I have been working on.

The animation for the "scanning" page is a bit slow. I think for practicality there should be an option to disable the animation and just show the results of the scan.

P.S. +rep because holy crap this is awesome!

 

[Commander Wolzan]

This is so bad-ass. Will you ever reveal how you did the OCR for the system view? I've been wanting to incorporate something like this into a personal project I have been working on.

The animation for the "scanning" page is a bit slow. I think for practicality there should be an option to disable the animation and just show the results of the scan.

P.S. +rep because holy crap this is awesome!

Hey thanks commander, yeah i saw your scan come through just then and I was holding my breath hoping that it would work well but jesus it did really well - it even got the First Discovered which it quite often doesn't

Good idea on the disabling animation part - that can be done, I can add a skip button at the bottom or something like that. Ive added it to the list.

The underlying technology for the scanner is something called Tesseract-OCR which was developed by hp but now maintained by google - its open source. That's the core OCR engine but then ive wrapped my own analysis engine around it which works out where everything is in the image and then does a lot of image processing, multiple passes and some data cleansing to try and get the best results. I'm hoping I can improve the accuracy by a chunk more with a bit more work, especially around atmospheres as it gets them a bit screwy now and again.

Glad you like it though, I am pleased with how it turned out

 

[CMDR Ulrick]

Hey thanks commander, yeah i saw your scan come through just then and I was holding my breath hoping that it would work well but jesus it did really well - it even got the First Discovered which it quite often doesn't

Good idea on the disabling animation part - that can be done, I can add a skip button at the bottom or something like that. Ive added it to the list.

The underlying technology for the scanner is something called Tesseract-OCR which was developed by hp but now maintained by google - its open source. That's the core OCR engine but then ive wrapped my own analysis engine around it which works out where everything is in the image and then does a lot of image processing, multiple passes and some data cleansing to try and get the best results. I'm hoping I can improve the accuracy by a chunk more with a bit more work, especially around atmospheres as it gets them a bit screwy now and again.

Glad you like it though, I am pleased with how it turned out

I see that's why you don't automatically parse the atmosphere type. That's the one piece of data I had to fill in manually. Seriously though, it's incredible. I'm surprised FDev doesn't have some sort of data export option in the game. That way we wouldn't have to resort to OCR techniques which, in my opinion, shouldn't be a necessity.

Leave it to the CMDRs to compile their raw data!