The autonomous game of chess against a human opponent is a challenge with a long history of breakthroughs that play an essential role in various fields today. Throughout history, humanity has managed to master chess logic and the challenge of moving chess pieces around the chessboard, while the task of recognizing chess pieces is a challenge that has not been fully solved even today.
This paper aims to research the possibility of using an Intel RealSense D435 camera and the OpenCV Surface Matching module, which is based on using Point-Pair features to recognize chess pieces. Additionally, we investigated the influence of several factors, namely illumination, reflectivity, rotation and overlapping of pieces, and the density of the captured point cloud on the success of chess piece recognition. For this purpose, we designed 3D models of chess pieces, printed them and created a set of point clouds, where the printed pieces were imaged under different conditions.
Based on the results, we concluded that chess piece recognition with the Intel RealSense D435 camera and the OpenCV Surface Matching module is too unreliable to be used in an automated chess game against a human opponent. However, it has given us a better understanding of the influence of the mentioned factors on the success of chess piece recognition, which may prove helpful in further research on object recognition from point clouds.
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