OCR Playing Cards

Question

I decided to do a project for fun where I want to take as input the image of a playing card and return its rank and suit. I figure that I only need look at the upper-left corner, since that has all the information. It should be robust - if I have a large image of an Ace of Diamonds, I should be able to scale it anywhere from 20 to 200% and still get the right answer.

First question - is there anything already written that does this? If so I'll find something else to OCR so I don't duplicate the efforts.

Second - what's the best way to go about doing this? Neural network? Something hand-coded? Can anyone give any pointers? (0xCAAF9452 is not an acceptable answer).

Answer 1

It's not as robust, but you can look at the colours of 3 or 4 locations on the card so that if they are white or if they are a color, you can determine which card and suit it is. Obviously this won't work if you don't always have the same cards.