Apparatus for recognizing dice dots

The present invention relates to an apparatus to recognize dice dots and particularly to an apparatus to recognize dice dots through a plurality of recognition and calculation methods.

These days people increasingly treasure leisure activities. As a result recreational businesses are flourishing. Among them gambling is very popular. Throwing or rolling dice is one of the widely loved games. It is almost ubiquitous, and can be seen in houses, outdoors and business environments. One of the common rules of the game of rolling dice is: players place bets first and guess the total dots; the dealer rolls the dice and counts the total dots when moving of the dice stops to determine win and loss.

In the conventional game playing rolling of the dice is done manually. The rectitude or fairness of the dealer who rolls the dice often is suspected by the players. As the force or angle of throwing the dice could affect the dot number and outcome. Some even resort to cheating schemes such as crooked dice or loaded dice to take the advantages of the ignorance of the players. This spoils the pleasure of playing dice games.

To remedy the aforesaid problem, automatic dice rolling machines have been developed that have a recognition means to confirm dice dots. The recognition means usually performs recognition by detecting the dots through electric signals such as picture signals. However, such a method is easily compromised by control of people and produces fake results. This creates concerns of the players and affects their willingness and interests in playing the game. Hence the automatic dice rolling machine is not well accepted in legitimate recreational sites.

Moreover, even if the dealer does not tamper the dice and affect the fairness of the dice games, the automatic dice rolling machine is prone to recognition errors due to deficiency of recognition techniques, such as starting recognition process while the dice are still moving, impact of environmental factors such as light and angles of image capturing and the like.

Therefore how to provide an accurate method and apparatus to recognize dice dots to improve the efficiency and fairness of dice rolling game is an issue remained to be resolved in the industry.

The primary object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus for recognizing dice dots. It includes a dice cup holding at least one dice, a light source module and a capturing module located in the dice cup. The light source module generates a plurality of lights to project on the dice. The capturing module captures images of the dice a number of times according to the projecting times of the light sources to generate a plurality of image information. The image information are sent to the recognizing module which stores a plurality of calculation methods to recognize the dice dots based on the image information.

Referring to the invention forth above, if recognized results of the calculation methods are the same, the dice dots are confirmed and accepted. If the recognized results of the calculation methods are different, the dice is rolled again. The light sources are generated by a light source module. The images of the dice are captured by a capturing module. The calculations are stored in a recognizing module. The method set forth above may be built in an application program stored in a computer accessible recording medium.

The invention, by projecting multiple light sources to the dice to get images of varying angles and through multiple calculation methods, achieves recognition of the dice dots. The recognition result of dice dots of the automatic dice rolling machine equipped with the features of the invention is more accurate. Operation efficiency of dice rolling improves and fairness of the game is enhanced.

The foregoing, as well as additional objects, features and advantages of the invention will be more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.