# TCG-AR: Real-Time Multi-View Augmented Reality for Trading Card Game Streaming

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02090 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02090/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [LightGlue: Local Feature Matching at Light Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13643/) (2023)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [Multi-Similarity Loss with General Pair Weighting for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06627/) (2019)
- [A Metric Learning Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08505/) (2020)
- [Training Deep Networks with Synthetic Data: Bridging the Reality Gap by Domain Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06516/) (2018)
- [Sampling Matters in Deep Embedding Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07567/) (2017)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [No Fuss Distance Metric Learning using Proxies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07464/) (2017)
- [Cut, Paste and Learn: Surprisingly Easy Synthesis for Instance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01642/) (2017)
- [ReDet: A Rotation-equivariant Detector for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07733/) (2021)
- [R3Det: Refined Single-Stage Detector with Feature Refinement for Rotating Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05612/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Trading card games are increasingly played and broadcast online, yet live streams remain mostly limited to flat top-down footage of the playing area. Augmenting such streams with virtual models of the played cards would improve the viewing experience, but most existing systems rely on instrumented playing surfaces and embedded chips, which are costly and impractical for casual players and large-scale events. In this work, we present TCG-AR, a novel real-time pipeline that augments trading card games using ordinary RGB cameras alone, without any physical markers or specialized hardware. Our pipeline detects, orients, and identifies the cards on the board, renders virtual content onto each card across all views, and can additionally compose a broadcaststyle view that summarizes the game state for spectators, streaming the augmented feeds to standard broadcasting software such as OBS. To train the detection, orientation, and identification models without manual labeling, we introduce an automatic procedure that generates annotated synthetic training data from a reference set of card images. Then, we evaluate several trained models on a new manually annotated dataset with real images, analyzing performance and runtime throughput that determine real-world usability. Overall, by relying only on commodity cameras and hardware, and by open-sourcing all code, models, and datasets, this work aims to serve as a reference for real-time trading card recognition and to make real-time augmented-reality streaming accessible to the broader community of players and streamers.
