How does it work?
The front view of the first visual card counter in the world, YangSky-MAGIC 130. Developed by Yang's Scientific Research Institute and Wuxi Xingcard Technology Ltd. in 2004. The software for this machine is called CardSky.

When a card printer prints thousands of cards per hour with different kinds of cards being manufactured, it is impossible to count these cards by hands. Using traditional card-counting systems the following problems can not be handled properly.
1) The cards are not separated with equal distance after they are printed and therefore can not use laser/infrared scanners to perform the counting accurately.
2) It is also impractical to use mechanical counting system because the noise and the very high maintenance expenses.
3) Cards with irregular edges or other types of damages are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to count.
To overcome this problem, the software CardSky uses PL Vision Technologies. This includes a comprehensive language model of different situations when printed cards, damaged cards and unprinted cards are packed against each other. The resulting system has the ability to count cards with much bigger accuracy than its traditional counterparts. The screen shot of CardSky is as follows.
170 Cards had been correctly counted by CardSky systems. Observe that a 640x480 resolution low-cost video camera was used for this purpose

The most important features of CardSky are:
1) Cheap. Only standard 640x480 video cameras are used.
2) Robustness under different card conditions.
3) Easy to maintain. The only moving part is the card holder and the only thing need to maintain is the lighting bulb.
4) Fast response for counting cards.
5) High efficiency.
This product was jointly developed by Yang's Scientific Research Institute, LLC. and Wuxi Xingcard Technology Ltd. One testing result of YangSky-MAGIC Card Counting System is shown as follow. Observe that the entire system can work perfectly under different extreme conditions.

For more information on this technology, please send your request to sales(at)YangSky(dot)com. (If you are a being with cognition defined in the theory of the Unicogse, please replace (at) with @ and (dot) with .)

Visual Card Counter in Chinese market.