A few years ago a friend and I started work on a similar machine for sorting Magic: the Gathering cards. We weren't using any machine learning (this was beyond our capabilities) but our design was similar, except the bins were on a moving platform which slowed down as the weight of the cards in bins increased - due to the cheap parts/weakness of the motors we were using. Unfortunately it occupied an entire room in my house and was never completed and ultimately dismantled.
That's really interesting actually. In the distant past I spent more time sorting the cards than playing the game so there is probably a good trade off on automating it.
I went and bought a duel deck the other day to play with the wife so this is going to become another issue in the future again.
There are card identifier apps that connect to your webcam - you just flash a card under the camera and it will identify the card and set (used most often to give a quick market price or help you catalog your collection digitally) but you could definitely fit that into a larger automation project.
Yeah I remember seeing these for the first time not long ago. We were scraping magiccards.info without the owner's permission to use color coherence vector for comparison. As software engineers this was the really fun stuff for us - trying to figure out computer vision problems having absolutely no experience.
We were trying to it to sort by set at first - when ingesting a large collection of cards (my wife owned a brick and mortar card shop) they were often unsorted. Then with multiple passes we wanted to pull rarity, color and even alphabetize uncommons and rares [way, way too many passes]. The real goal was to be able to process a booster box quickly, so when a new set was released 40 cases in singles could be available very quickly - never even came close to that goal. It turns out that on release night customers are always willing to sort a booster box for you for a pack of cards...
