Countdown

What

This is a system that can watch Countdown (if fed the video stream for it) and then decode the letters that are being offered, then tweet the response in speed. The system runs at around 100FPS on an i5 Laptop far greater then the input rate of 25 FPS from TV.

Contained inside

Inside is the source code for the MJPEG decoder that is to be used for the input. You can feed the system a flv by using the following command in the terminal.

ffmpeg.exe -i ../countdowna.flv -acodec none -vcodec mjpeg -f mjpeg - | ./AutoCountdown/bin/Debug/AutoCountdown.exe

This will take the input FLV (In the real system it is piped into ffmpeg) and have ffmpeg output a MJPEG stream.

Inside of the program is a MJPEG decoder for this use.

How

Input

This system uses FFMPEG for its major heavy lifting. The system takes MJPEG in.

Detection

The system looks for frames like the following:

Each frame is evaluated for being a frame with the letters in by using the two solid parts as shown:

Extraction

If the frame passes that test then it scanned to find the 'box' edges:

The 'box' is then processed to find the bright parts (the text) then outputted to a PNG file

This file is then passed to tesseract in order to do OCR, the result is then read out.

Twitter posting

Once the winning words are calculated, Tinytwitter is used to post the tweet. (Patch for API 1.1 is coming.)

Requirements

Right now there are a few hardcoded paths to things like tesseract. While the system should run under mono, the paths for tesseract need to be fixed for that to happen.