Papers › Chessboard and chess piece recognition with the support of neural networks
Chessboard and chess piece recognition with the support of neural networks
Maciej A. Czyzewski, Artur Laskowski, Szymon Wasik
Chessboard and chess piece recognition is a computer vision problem that has not yet been efficiently solved. However, its solution is crucial for many experienced players who wish to compete against AI bots, but also prefer to make decisions based on the analysis of a physical chessboard. It is also important for organizers of chess tournaments who wish to digitize play for online broadcasting or ordinary players who wish to share their gameplay with friends. Typically, such digitization tasks are performed by humans or with the aid of specialized chessboards and pieces. However, neither solution is easy or convenient. To solve this problem, we propose a novel algorithm for digitizing chessboard configurations. We designed a method that is resistant to lighting conditions and the angle at which images are captured, and works correctly with numerous chessboard styles. The proposed algorithm processes pictures iteratively. During each iteration, it executes three major sub-processes: detecting straight lines, finding lattice points, and positioning the chessboard. Finally, we identify all chess pieces and generate a description of the board utilizing standard notation. For each of these steps, we designed our own algorithm that surpasses existing solutions. We support our algorithms by utilizing machine learning techniques whenever possible. The described method performs extraordinarily well and achieves an accuracy over 99.5% for detecting chessboard lattice points (compared to the 74% for the best alternative), 95% (compared to 60% for the best alternative) for positioning the chessboard in an image, and almost 95% for chess piece recognition.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections