[OC] Surface defects of pokemon cards

Hey guys,

Just wanted to share what I've been working on for the last year or so. It's not perfect, and progress has been painfully slow for a hobby project (maybe that's what makes it a good hobby), but it's been pretty fun.

In essence, I finally decided to put my PhD and two decades of scientific research training to good use and quantify surface and edge irregularities of pokemon cards down to microscopic detail. Results were standardized and compared against control/reference cards and against a real population of cards (3D scanned about 200 cards so far from various years and generations). The empirical distributions were then used to simulate the current market.

Overall, again it's not perfect, but it's been pretty good at picking up details you wouldn't catch on a phone camera or even a flatbed scanner. Fine-tuning the algorithm for standard non-holo cards was honestly not too bad. But because the scanning method depends on angles of light reflections, getting it to work on holographic foil cards was a massive headache. 

Each card got a composite score of various reflection/refraction metrics on a 0 to 10 scale with a full breakdown of surface and edge scores separately, along with a heatmap showing exactly where the irregularities are. So you can actually see what's dragging the score down rather than just getting a number.

At the end of the day, quantifying and standardizing card qualities against a real population of cards in a normalized way was a pretty fun little project.

Anyway, thanks. Thought it was neat. Keeps getting deleted over at pokemon subreddits, so I thought maybe I'd have better luck sharing my thoughts here…