Saturday, May 17, 2014

Sudoku Capturer 1.4

Today I released a new version of my Sudoku solver app for Android.

Sudoku Capturer 1.4 with incremental number detection

From a user perspective, the most prominent new feature is that the app now shows incremental progress of the numbers which were recognized successfully. This fixes one of the biggest problem with the approach the application had before - numbers which were identified erroneously and which led to a deadlock in the solving algorithm itself.

Currently, on each frame the application makes a quick sanity check if a number would violate the basic rules of the sudoku game - that is to say if at a given cell for example the number seven would be identified, the application now checks if there is already a seven in the same row, column or section. If yes, the whole Sudoku is rendered invalid and the detection algorithm starts from scratch.

In older versions of the application, only one frame of the video stream would be the input for the solving algorithm, which frequently led to non terminating behavior of the solving algorithm itself.

The application is now counting how often a certain number is recognized for a given cell, and after hitting a certain threshold the probability that the detection was correct is certainly higher than without using this simple strategy.

Furthermore, if the Sudoku Capturer app is not able to build up a library of all number from 1 to 9 it paints the number with a internal font - this should happen only very rarely, though.

Give it a try on on your android device, I would be interested in your feedback.

You can download the Sudoku Capturer application in the play store: