[Computer-go] [ANN] Imago - Go board optical recognition

[Petr Baudis]

Hi!

Tomas Musil (a student of mine), has created a state-of-the-art open
source Go board optical recognition software. We have focused on
completely automatic runs, so it automatically detects the board corners
and then the stones on the board, and the precision seems pretty good
at least in reasonable lighting conditions.

You can find it at http://tomasm.cz/imago together with a lot of
pictures, documentation and bachelor thesis describing the algorithms
in detail. In the thesis, Tomas also compares it against other similar
apps, and it appears Imago shows the best performance of all these
that were available to us.

Unfortunately, we specifically couldn't easily compare it to Remi
Coulom's Kifu-snap for multiple reasons - mainly because that is
a mobile app. Hopefully, someone will be able to compare these two
in the future. At any rate, I think Imago is a great starting point
for anyone who would like to play with Go board recognition.


My personal dream would be if we added video capability and further
improved speed + reliability in time for EGC2015 (in Czech Republic)
and were able to deploy it there to transfer large number of top boards.
But this will depend on how much time Tomas will have after the summer
(and we didn't actually check with EGC2015 organizers yet), so it's
still more of just a dream. :-)

Petr Baudis
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[Aja Huang]

I'm dreaming about this scene in EGC 2015..

Several cameras are relaying the games of the best players. A smart optical recognition program automatically converts the streaming images to sgfs and sends them to a Go program. The Go program then shows rich analyses over the games, such as wining rate, best moves, principal variations, estimated territories, etc, even predicts the next moves. A spectator is watching a friend's game and wondering who is ahead. He doesn't understand Go very well. He uses his android phone takes a snapshot. After 3 seconds, the Go software oh his phone immediately tells him that his friend is ahead for 20 points and winning with 90% chance. 

It's more of just a dream though. :-)

Aja

[Horace Ho]

Congratulations!

I am curious what is the license for code use. It's not GPL (wonderful!) but what is it (like)?

Thanks

horace

[Petr Baudis]

Hi!

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 08:19:42PM +0800, Horace Ho wrote:
> I am curious what is the license for code use. It's not GPL (wonderful!)
> but what is it (like)?

It's the standard three-clause BSD licence:

https://github.com/tomasmcz/imago/blob/master/LICENSE

I.e. a simple, extremely permissive licence that *roughly* amounts to
"do anything you want with the code as long as you give credit".

[Horace Ho]

Wonderful!

On Tuesday, August 12, 2014, Petr Baudis <pa...@ucw.cz> wrote:

[Rémi Coulom]

Thanks Petr, Thanks Thomas,

Very interesting report.

I do something similar in kifu-snap. Instead of RANSAC, I use another Hough Transform to detect the sinusoids in the first Hough Transform. I also use k-means color clustering for detecting stones, but also combine this with other features (like circle detection). So kifu-snap should work with black-and-white diagrams, for instance. I used a lot of tricks to make my implementation fast (because it has to be fast on a phone), so it takes only 0.1 second on average to process one picture on one core of my 2.4 GHz core2 duo notebook.

Your dataset is way too easy, though. I tried only a few pics, and kifu-snap had no difficulty with them. I uploaded my own dataset there:
http://remi.coulom.free.fr/kifu-snap/goban.tar.bz2
I don’t own the rights for most of these photos. Found most of them with Google images. If anybody complains, I will remove the file. The .ks files are coordinates of the corners of the board (pixels, with 0,0 at the center of the image, IIRC). The .gob files are stone configurations.

This is the result of stone-recognition (given the correct grid placement from the .ks file):
http://remi.coulom.free.fr/kifu-snap/stone-recognition.txt
(time is in milliseconds)

Only 32/99 grids placements are recognized correctly. Most frequent mistake is to be off by one or two lines in one direction.

Only 14/99 are fully recognized automatically.

I admit some of them are particularly tricky. But I also have plenty of pictures from real usage of kifu-snap, and it is still difficult to be correct. When I use kifu-snap at the Go club or in a tournament, I usually get a 100% automatically recognized board a bit more than 50% of the time (completely biased guessed rate).

Automatic Go board recognition is a really difficult and fun challenge.

Rémi

[David Fotland]

This sounds like something we could add to the FireFly object recognition feature on the Fire Phone.

 

David

[uurtamo .]

Very very nice!

[Petr Baudis]

Hi!

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 01:15:11PM +0100, Aja Huang wrote:
> Several cameras are relaying the games of the best players. A smart optical
> recognition program automatically converts the streaming images to sgfs and
> sends them to a Go program. The Go program then shows rich analyses over
> the games, such as wining rate, best moves, principal variations, estimated
> territories, etc, even predicts the next moves. A spectator is watching a
> friend's game and wondering who is ahead. He doesn't understand Go very
> well. He uses his android phone takes a snapshot. After 3 seconds, the Go
> software oh his phone immediately tells him that his friend is ahead for 20
> points and winning with 90% chance.

I'm sure we will get there, and maybe it won't take so long. :-)
Working on a reliable recognition could be a good first step. I think
analysis of the top boards is the most difficult part as it's similar
difficulty as playing on that level.

I think Remi is best positioned to build something like this as he has
most of the pieces. Otherwise, we'd need a sort of (ideally open)
ecosystem in the mobile, mainly an app that brings the engine, analysis
visualization, recognition and some Go GUI all together. Doesn't
require any scientific breakthroughs, just patience and technical skill.

--
Petr Baudis
Life is short, the craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment
treacherous, judgment difficult. -- Hippocrates

[Rémi Coulom]

On 13 août 2014, at 10:35, Petr Baudis <pa...@ucw.cz> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 01:15:11PM +0100, Aja Huang wrote:
>> Several cameras are relaying the games of the best players. A smart optical
>> recognition program automatically converts the streaming images to sgfs and
>> sends them to a Go program. The Go program then shows rich analyses over
>> the games, such as wining rate, best moves, principal variations, estimated
>> territories, etc, even predicts the next moves. A spectator is watching a
>> friend's game and wondering who is ahead. He doesn't understand Go very
>> well. He uses his android phone takes a snapshot. After 3 seconds, the Go
>> software oh his phone immediately tells him that his friend is ahead for 20
>> points and winning with 90% chance.
>
> I'm sure we will get there, and maybe it won't take so long. :-)
> Working on a reliable recognition could be a good first step. I think
> analysis of the top boards is the most difficult part as it's similar
> difficulty as playing on that level.
>
> I think Remi is best positioned to build something like this as he has
> most of the pieces. Otherwise, we'd need a sort of (ideally open)
> ecosystem in the mobile, mainly an app that brings the engine, analysis
> visualization, recognition and some Go GUI all together. Doesn't
> require any scientific breakthroughs, just patience and technical skill.
>

There was a bit of irony in Aja’s post, because kifu-snap & Crazy Stone already did this in Sibiu. That’s the reason for the last sentence of his message (the one you did not quote).

I know the monthly subscription system that Unbalance used for this app turned out extremely unpopular, but they are not willing to change it now. Note that you can try the app for free for 10 days. If you don’t want to pay, then just be careful to cancel your subscription before the end of the 10 days.

I am confident the recognition rate of kifu snap could be improved a lot. But I’d rather not claim too much, because it would not be the first time I underestimate the difficulty of such tasks. It is a really exciting problem. I’ll certainly work on it again when I have some free time, and I’ll follow your progress with a lot of interest.

Rémi

[Petr Baudis]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 11:02:21AM +0200, Rémi Coulom wrote:
> There was a bit of irony in Aja’s post, because kifu-snap & Crazy Stone already did this in Sibiu. That’s the reason for the last sentence of his message (the one you did not quote).

Oh, I see. I didn't get that, sorry. :-)

That's pretty impressive then!

> I know the monthly subscription system that Unbalance used for this app turned out extremely unpopular, but they are not willing to change it now. Note that you can try the app for free for 10 days. If you don’t want to pay, then just be careful to cancel your subscription before the end of the 10 days.

I didn't attend a real-world Go event for much longer than a year by
now I think, so I wouldn't really get a chance to try kifu-snap for
real too much. All I went by for a first impression of day-to-day
performance was the feedback at

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.unbalance.android.kifusnap

but based on what you say, maybe most of the negative feedback was due
to the required subscription rather than actual functionality... It's
a pity that Unbalance insists on it.

--
Petr Baudis
Life is short, the craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment
treacherous, judgment difficult. -- Hippocrates

[Petr Baudis]

Hi!

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 03:51:46PM +0200, Rémi Coulom wrote:
> Your dataset is way too easy, though. I tried only a few pics, and kifu-snap had no difficulty with them. I uploaded my own dataset there:
> http://remi.coulom.free.fr/kifu-snap/goban.tar.bz2
> I don’t own the rights for most of these photos. Found most of them with Google images. If anybody complains, I will remove the file. The .ks files are coordinates of the corners of the board (pixels, with 0,0 at the center of the image, IIRC). The .gob files are stone configurations.
>
> This is the result of stone-recognition (given the correct grid placement from the .ks file):
> http://remi.coulom.free.fr/kifu-snap/stone-recognition.txt
> (time is in milliseconds)

Thanks a lot for sharing that dataset! If Tomas is able to resume his
work on Imago, I hope he'll make sure to measure its performance on this
dataset as well - a good reference dataset was something we missed. If
not, we still hope Imago will encourage + provide a starting point for
others to work on this and spur some friendly competition and further
innovation in this area.

[Aja Huang]

2014-08-13 10:02 GMT+01:00 Rémi Coulom <Remi....@free.fr>:

There was a bit of irony in Aja’s post, because kifu-snap & Crazy Stone already did this in Sibiu. That’s the reason for the last sentence of his message (the one you did not quote)

Oh, I actually didn't know your app was already doing that. I thought Crazy Stone was analyzing positions given from sgfs, not snapshots.

Aja 

["Ingo Althöfer"]

Hi Aja, hi all,

 

two comments.

 

(i) I did such analysis during the decisive final games of the EGC 2010 in Tampere.

I was sitting at home, had KGS running, and also ManyFaces 12 in analysis mode.

Every few moves I gave winning percentages (as estimated by MFoG) plus

some additional information.

Several co-spectator liked the service; some even explicitly said "thank you" to me.

Others proposed that I should shut-up (because a go-bot together with an operator

on 17-kyu level could not give helpful information.)

 

(ii) Having experiences from the world of chess and computer chess for 30 years

I can only warn to force such live computer analysis in the tournament hall. It

will not be for long that cheating with computer help (eDoping) will play a role

in tournament Go - and having the computers even in the tournament halls will

make things even worse.

 

Cheers, Ingo.

 

PS. In my new book (together with chess IM and puzzle expert Roland Voigt)

computer abuse in tournament chess will be a central chapter.

The book will come to the market in mid-October. Unfortunately it is - at

least the first edition - in German.

http://www.althofer.de/springer-buch.html

 

 

 

Aja wrote

Oh, I actually didn't know your app was already doing that. I thought Crazy Stone was analyzing positions given from sgfs, not snapshots.

 

and:

 

> I'm dreaming about this scene in EGC 2015.. Several cameras are relaying the

> games of the best players. A smart optical recognition program automatically

> converts the streaming images to sgfs and sends them to a Go program. The Go

> program then shows rich analyses over the games, such as wining rate, best moves,

> principal variations, estimated territories, etc, even predicts the next moves. A spectator

> is watching a friend's game and wondering who is ahead. He doesn't understand Go

> very well. He uses his android phone takes a snapshot. After 3 seconds, the Go software

> on his phone immediately tells him that his friend is ahead for 20 points and winning

> with 90% chance. It's more of just a dream though. :-)

[Andrea Carta]

> Tomas Musil (a student of mine), has created a state-of-the-art open
> source Go board optical recognition software. We have focused on
> completely automatic runs, so it automatically detects the board corners
> and then the stones on the board, and the precision seems pretty good
> at least in reasonable lighting conditions.
>

> My personal dream would be if we added video capability and further
> improved speed + reliability in time for EGC2015 (in Czech Republic)
> and were able to deploy it there to transfer large number of top boards.
> But this will depend on how much time Tomas will have after the summer
> (and we didn't actually check with EGC2015 organizers yet), so it's
> still more of just a dream.

Hello mr. Baudis!
Musil's work is remarkable indeed. I and my fellow colleague, prof. Mario
Corsolini, studied the thesis and found it of the greatest interest, both on
the theoretical side and the practical one. BTW, Musil seems to believe that
"we have not found any other work that we can meaningfully compare our
results with"; but since november 2012 we have developed and distributed
PhotoKifu, a program aimed to reconstruct whole Go games by means of a
series of photograph. We're now releasing version 2.1 (a paper is also in
progress) and are working on version 2.5, which will implement Open CV
instead of the external (and slow) suite Image Magick. We're also working on
VideoKifu, a program that will reconstruct a game from a live video feed; we
could not develop VideoKifu before because of the slow Image Magick suite,
but Open CV will allow that.
At the moment (version 2.1) we achieve on single pictures the same - very
good - results Musil got, and take 1 to 4 seconds for picture depending on
its size. But our program is optimized for whole games, for which we have
100% stones recognition, even in the presence of hands and whole arms
between the camera and the goban (of course the stones we're looking for
must still be visible), given the pictures are not too small (I estimate at
least 1024 x 768). That requires about 1/10 of second for each picture plus
image optimization either by Image Magick or Open CV.
Of course, we too are interested in EGC 2015. We hoped to attend the
scientific conference at EGC 2013, but could not find reliable informations.
Maybe Musil will now be able to contact EGC 2015's organizers and catch
their interest: it would be a remarkable feat if we could both go and talk
about (and, of course, demonstrate) two programs making use of different
approaches. For the moment we're planning to do such a thing during the big
international Pisa tournament at the beginning of March, but the EGC 2015
would be the ideal stage.
Let us know if you're interested, of course!

mr. Andrea Carta, BSc(IT)

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[Petr Baudis]

Hi!

On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 01:55:35AM +0000, Andrea Carta wrote:
> > Tomas Musil (a student of mine), has created a state-of-the-art open
> > source Go board optical recognition software. We have focused on
> > completely automatic runs, so it automatically detects the board corners
> > and then the stones on the board, and the precision seems pretty good
> > at least in reasonable lighting conditions.
>

> Hello mr. Baudis!
> Musil's work is remarkable indeed. I and my fellow colleague, prof. Mario
> Corsolini, studied the thesis and found it of the greatest interest, both on
> the theoretical side and the practical one.

I'm very happy to hear that!

> BTW, Musil seems to believe that
> "we have not found any other work that we can meaningfully compare our
> results with"; but since november 2012 we have developed and distributed
> PhotoKifu, a program aimed to reconstruct whole Go games by means of a
> series of photograph.

Sorry about this - we must have missed PhotoKifu when surveying the
available software.

> > My personal dream would be if we added video capability and further
> > improved speed + reliability in time for EGC2015 (in Czech Republic)
> > and were able to deploy it there to transfer large number of top boards.
> > But this will depend on how much time Tomas will have after the summer
> > (and we didn't actually check with EGC2015 organizers yet), so it's
> > still more of just a dream.
>

> Of course, we too are interested in EGC 2015. We hoped to attend the
> scientific conference at EGC 2013, but could not find reliable informations.

There will be a scientific conference at EGC 2015 as well:

http://pasky.or.cz/iggsc2015/

I think a presentation of paper describing your system would find a very
interested audience.

> Maybe Musil will now be able to contact EGC 2015's organizers and catch
> their interest:

Unfortunately, this is not likely to happen - Tomas Musil has other
commitments now and didn't have enough time to make Imago production
ready in time for such a deployment (i.e. speed much up, error rate
much down, video processing, ...).

So if it's just up to our software, automatic streaming of boards
using Imago on EGC2015 will not happen.

(Tomas also started a project that's more interesting for him,
a Haskell rewrite of Imago: https://github.com/tomasmcz/imago-hs,
if anyone is interested.)

> it would be a remarkable feat if we could both go and talk
> about (and, of course, demonstrate) two programs making use of different
> approaches. For the moment we're planning to do such a thing during the big
> international Pisa tournament at the beginning of March, but the EGC 2015
> would be the ideal stage.

That would be great, I think! When planning the deployment, we aimed
to first test the software on series of events - in (well lit) Go clubs
and on a larger tournament - starting the testing around now to have
enough time to test it sufficiently and notice things like sun suddenly
coming out of clouds, bumping the table, Go server streaming issues etc.

We also wanted to start talking around now to wms (KGS author) about
a possibility of extending kgsGTP computer program interface of KGS
to demonstration games. I would recommend you to reserve enough time
to working out these things too.

If the system goes through sufficient prior testing, I think deploying
it on EGC2015 would be truly awesome and I would be glad to support it.
I cannot promise any significant time commitment to software development
or even on-site support, but I can talk to the organizers and consult on
technical issues. I think a good time to start discussing this with
them would be after a first successful real-world tournament test (even
on a small scale like single board).

Kind regards and good luck,

--
Petr Baudis
If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely
you'll do important work. -- R. Hamming
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

[Andrea Carta]

Hi mr. Baudis!

> we must have missed PhotoKifu when surveying the available software.

We're getting used to that. In Italy Go is completely unknown and everything
related goes unnoticed. Months ago I showed the program to a colleague of
mine, who shares many of my hobbies, and he asked "What is this? Chinese
checkers?".

> There will be a scientific conference at EGC 2015 as well:
>
> http://pasky.or.cz/iggsc2015/
>
> I think a presentation of paper describing your system would find a very
> interested audience.

That's a fantastic new! After getting no reply from Sibiu last year we were
afraid a second conference would never occur. We'll complete the paper soon
and will attend the conference. We're already checking the accomodations in
Liberec!

> we aimed to first test the software on series of events - in (well lit)
> Go clubs and on a larger tournament - starting the testing around now
> to have enough time to test it sufficiently and notice things like sun
> suddenly coming out of clouds, bumping the table, Go server streaming
> issues etc.

We did an extensive test in December 2012, at the Firenze Go tournament
(http://www.eurogotv.com/tournament/showresults.php?toernooicode=T121208B).
We realised our program (then version 1.0) only worked fine under good
conditions - well lit environment, high point of view, limited number of
"disturbances" in the pictures. We encountered dim lights (gobans' surfaces
looked almost grey in the morning, completely grey in the afternoon),
average points of view (40°-50° of elevation), and up to 60-70 pictures per
game spoiled by fingers, hands, arms (sometimes of both players in the same
picture, for example: http://i59.tinypic.com/10cnu5c.jpg).
It took us a long time, but eventually we solved all these problems. We are
now capable of analyzing without errors, taking just a bunch of
milliseconds, even this kind of pictures: http://i61.tinypic.com/ak9zdv.jpg
(this is probably the worst kind, speaking of "sun suddendly coming out of
the clouds")

> We also wanted to start talking around now to wms (KGS author) about
> a possibility of extending kgsGTP computer program interface of KGS
> to demonstration games. I would recommend you to reserve enough time
> to working out these things too.

Firenze's go players did ask us for such a thing (live feed on KGS). We're
certainly going to work that out as soon as VideoKifu will be ready.

> I think a good time to start discussing this with them [EGC's organizers]

> would be after a first successful real-world tournament test (even on a
> small scale like single board).

Of course we'll let you know about the Pisa testing. We're now contacting
the organizers and will likely be able to take pictures of 3 or 4 games, and
print the Kifus immediately afterwards (in a matter of minutes, we hope).

Greetings and thanks for your interest!

mr. Andrea Carta

[Marc Landgraf]

Out of curiosity...

In the picture you linked ( http://i59.tinypic.com/10cnu5c.jpg ), how does your program read the position in the top left, considering the illegal stone there? 

Or does it not have any Go rules knowledge and leaves the interpretation to the user? In that case it may create .sgf with illegal moves in it. Considering during a regular game, you will actually snapshot illegal positions a few times (when you take a picture between placing the stone and removing the captures) I'm really wondering how your program handles it.

[Andrea Carta]

Marc Landgraf <mahrgell87 <at> gmail.com> writes:

> Out of curiosity...In the picture you linked

> ( http://i59.tinypic.com/10cnu5c.jpg ), how does your program read
> the position in the top left, considering the illegal stone there? 
>
> Or does it not have any Go rules knowledge and leaves the interpretation
> to the user? In that case it may create .sgf with illegal moves in it.
> Considering during a regular game, you will actually snapshot illegal
> positions a few times (when you take a picture between placing the stone
> and removing the captures) I'm really wondering how your program handles it.

Of course it is advisable to take every picture after the removal of the
stones possibly captured; the program expects such stones to be removed from
the goban. Otherwise, two cases are possible. First one, the player forgot
to remove the stone (or did not make in time): in such a case the program
detects the error and asks the user what to do next. Second, a suicide move
was played (willingly or not). In such a case the program checks the rules
and, if suicide is not allowed, again asks the user what to do next
(otherwise it gets on). But as this particular problem does not concern the
main algorithm, we have not made a final decision. There are other options
on the table (for example automatic error correction/stone addition).

[Josef Moudrik]

Hello Andrea,

I happen to be organizing the "technical section" of EGC2015, and we would certainly be really glad to use automatic transcription and internet broadcasting, as this would make it possible to broadcast more boards with less manpower (hopefully more precisely, it is common that one human transcribes two boards and there are mistakes e.g. in ko fights).

We were actually considering this option ourselves, but I concluded that there does not exist a production-ready solution yet. I have missed photokifu as well in my research (and to be honest, it is hard to find your app even if I know its name, mostly because there seems to be an iApp called the same).

However, were we to use automatic transcription, we would need to make sure it works reliably.

Best regards,
Josef

Dne so 17. 1. 2015 21:38 uživatel Andrea Carta <andrea...@mclink.it> napsal:

[Mario Corsolini]

Hi Josef, and everybody!

I am Mario Corsolini, the other author of PhotoKifu. I am aware our program
was a little hidden in the Internet, mainly because until few weeks ago only
an Italian version existed. Now you can download the international (EN/IT)
version from my website:

http://www.oipaz.net/PhotoKifu.html

Within few days v2.10 will be available, featuring an improved recognition
routine (as previously stated by Andrea), as well as various bugfixes.

After the tests in Pisa we will be able to provide more details, re its
reliability. For the moment I just want to point out that PhotoKifu still
requires a human operator: pictures must be shot during the game, then
transferred into a computer and analysed by our program.

In order to achieve a higher level of automatism we must complete VideoKifu,
which at present is in a very early stage of development. I suppose in
ECG2015 we will have a working prototype for a demonstration, at best: an
official release will most likely be ready before ECG2016.

Best regards,
Dr Mario Corsolini

[Alexandre Nuno Milheiro de Oliveira]

Here's a demonstration of some work I did for University.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX6s-3Xm7xU

It's done with OpenCV and I'll be happy to share the code with whoever is interested.

--

Alexandre Nuno Milheiro de Oliveira

[Andrea Carta]

Petr Baudis <pasky <at> ucw.cz> writes:

> I think a presentation of paper describing your system would find a very
> interested audience.

> If the system goes through sufficient prior testing, I think deploying

> it on EGC2015 would be truly awesome and I would be glad to support it.

Hi again!
I'm glad to let everyone know that:
- version 2.1 of PhotoKifu was released last week; we're now working on
version 2.5.
- Pisa's organizers agreed on letting us take pictures (or movies, we'll
decide later) of some games. One of the players will also contribute (he
wants to take the pictures himself); others will probably join later on.
- in the next days we'll make a movie of PhotoKifu analyzing a game we
recorded two years ago at the David tournament, and will post it on YouTube;
- the paper is on its way, and hopefully will be ready at the end of March.

mr. Andrea Carta

[Andrea Carta]

... and again...

> - Pisa's organizers agreed on letting us take pictures (or movies, we'll
> decide later) of some games. One of the players will also contribute (he
> wants to take the pictures himself); others will probably join later on.

Pisa was a success. At least, it was on the software side; not so much on
the hardware's. The first game, my colleague took pictures with his camera,
and everything went allright - the reconstruction was completed in a matter
of few minutes. The second game, I also took pictures with my camera, but
one of the players kept bumping the table and even my tripod, creating so
many errors it required about twenty minutes to complete the reconstruction
- we'll discard this game. The third game, we recorded a video with an Ipad
mounted on a tripod: everything went right and we'll proceed with the
reconstruction as soon as we'll have enough frames extracted. The fourth
game, we tried a new program, PhotoClock, capable of taking a picture each
time one of the players pressed the keyboard (it worked as a clock): that
proved uneffective, as the players' arms were present in each picture (the
contrary of what we hoped), and we'll have to try again with a pair of
mouses instead.
In the whole, we're very satisfied. The paper will be ready at the end of
the week, but without a LaTeX template or at least the number of chars per
page we won't be able to redact it. We hope the problem will be solved soon!

[Mario Corsolini]

Hi everybody!
Two days ago we released PhotoKifu v3.00, that heavily relies on OpenCV
instead of the nice, but slow, ImageMagick suite. We are now able to process
each picture in about a tenth of a second, pre-processing included.
Everything may be found at http://www.oipaz.net/PhotoKifu.html, including a
new demo video, this time featuring the Guo Juan vs. Crazy Manja game,
played this summer in Liberec during the Second International Go Game
Science Conference. This was an important game from many points of view, as
not only a professional player (Guo Juan) was involved, but a test was
performed on the advantages of human-computer cooperation, with full success
(the human-computer team performed beyond expectations for human alone).
This demo video is available at
http://www.oipaz.net/REP/GuoJuan-CrazyManja.mp4. All the pictures from the
game are at http://www.oipaz.net/REP/GuoJuan-CrazyManja.zip.

We'll probably release one more version of Photokifu, then we'll start
working on VideoKifu, a (very) preliminary version of which we hopefully
will be able to demonstrate next summer, during EGC2016, although at the
moment it's not certain that a scientific conference will be held in
Saint-Petersburg too.

--
Dr Mario Corsolini