“Aha – Winter Games!” exhibition curling scorekeeper application

Description

In their “Aha – Winter Games!” exhibition, Science Centre Ahhaa assembled a lifesize curling track inside their exhibition hall. To accompany that, we teamed up with them and made an automated scorekeeper. The scorekeeper, with the help of Kinect sensor, calculates the distance of the rocks from the center of the house and identifies which team is the owner of those rocks. No more quarreling with your buddies over whose rock made it closer to the center! The distances and current score are displayed on a large TV screen for all the participants to see.

Our participation

• implementation of UI according to the design files give by the client
• programming the application
• OS installation and configuration for kiosk mode (timed and automated restarts etc)
• on-site calibration of the Kinect software

Technical info

The location of rocks are fetched from Kinect’s depth frame, after applying a bit of blob recognition algorithms. The fetched location is then mapped to correspond to a location in the color frame received from Kinect. That way we can identify the color of the rocks and thus to which team they belong to. You can set the center of the curling “house” in the calibration mode. This is then used to calculate the distance of the rock. All the rock on the frame are then arranged by their distance and the current score is displayed according to the rules of curling. The actual distance of the rocks from the center of the “house” is measured and calculated on-site when doing the calibration to ensure a correct coefficient. The calibration mode is used to tweak the distance of the Kinect sensor, various image processing parameters, and allows for easier relocation of the exhibit.

• OS: Win10
• language/framework: python, pykinect2, numpy, pygame, opencv, AHK

Media

[rev_slider alias=”curling_slider”][/rev_slider]