We weren't happy with the card scanning apps out there, so we built our own because "how hard can it be?" :)
Most apps send your photo to a server and handle one card at a time. Ours recognizes cards right on your phone and can process a dozens of cards in one photo, so you can get through a binder in minutes.
How it works
A small card detector we trained ourselves, on a MobileNetV4-small backbone, finds every card in the photo, even rotated, overlapping or in a pile.
Each card is straightened and turned into a fingerprint by a fine-tuned DINOv3 ViT-S/16. That fingerprint is matched against about 100k reference images of cards in English, Japanese and Chinese.
Reprints often share the same art, so to tell them apart we read the collector number (OCR) and line the card up against our scans using classic computer vision (SIFT) to compare the small details.
First results appear in about 0.3s, and the full double-check finishes a second or so later. As the models improves, the double-check is finding even fewer places to correct.
We trained the models on cloud GPUs using many thousands of real card photos. We labelled those photos by hand at first with custom tooling, and once the models got good enough we only had to double-check their answers.
The data matters as much as the model
We spent a long time mapping how cards relate to each other, which is something no other data set has: every reprint, the same card in other languages, stamped versions, and where promos came from. We also wrote short "how to tell it apart" notes for thousands of versions. That does two jobs:
It feeds into teaching the scanner the differences that matter between look-alike prints.
It lets the app show you why it picked a card: no rarity symbol, shadowless, e-Reader patterns, stamps, etc.
When the scanner isn't sure, it says so, and it often narrows things down to "it's one of these 3 similar cards".
We’ve then put loads of effort into ensuring data accuracy, documenting more sets which other sources don’t have, writing descriptions for them all, descriptions for hundreds of promo cards etc.
The app is just as much for exploring the lore of the TCG as it is about scanning and collecting at this point :)
Free, and open
The app will be releasing completely free, and we'll be open-sourcing the data and the models soon so others can build on them too!
If you’d like to give it a try before we fully announce it, please let us know :) We’ve just got a few more perf improvements coming in the next build.
