wordbase-solver

Wordbase Solver is live! http://wordbase.alexjiao.com

##Dependencies

• OpenCV and Python bindings
• pytesseract for Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

##Usage

• cd wordbase-solver/src
• python extract_game_board_text.py wordbase.png to print out the gameboard in console
• python tst_wrapper.py to try out the tree loaded with dictionary
• python solver.py [blue/orange] [/path/to/screenshot.jpg] to find suitable words in the given screenshot, given the player color

##How it works Image before preprocessing | Intermediate image | Preprocessed image used for OCR :-------------------------:|:-------------------------:|:-------------------------:|:-----------------------:| | |

• The screenshot is preprocessed using OpenCV functions to generate a B&W image which makes OCR more effective
  • Simple thresholding is used to convert the screenshot to B&W
  • Contour finding is used to find inverted regions and invert them
  • Erosion is used to deal with tricky cases where two diagonal inverted regions stick with each other, making it difficult to obtain the contours
• Tesseract is used to recognize individual characters from the preprocessed B&W image
• Characters are stored in a 2D array, along with its color mapping.
• A tree data structure is initialized to store 170k+ English words from the dictionary with O(w) lookup where w is the length of the word
• A graph of characters and their neighbors is created from the 2D array, and DFS is employed to find all valid words from the graph
• The list of valid words is sorted according to the word's promixity to the opponent's base (the nearer, the better).

##To-do list

1. Dockerization since setting up dependencies is quite time consuming
2. Make web app more user-friendly