Card Scanner

What is the Card Scanner?

The Card Scanner is a computer-vision API that identifies trading cards from photos. Point a camera at a card and get back the card name, set, print variant, and matching price data — in under a second.

It uses a two-stage pipeline:

1. Detect — YOLOv8 locates the card in the image and crops it cleanly, even at an angle or in poor lighting.
2. Match — A FAISS vector index (CNN embeddings + perceptual hash fallback) finds the closest cards in the database.

Base URL

https://scanner.cardprices.io

Authentication

The scanner uses the same API key as the main API. Include it in every request:

X-API-Key: pub_live_YOUR_KEY_HERE

No second key is needed. One key works for both api.cardprices.io and scanner.cardprices.io.

Scan Credits

Scanner requests consume scan credits, which are separate from your regular API credits.

Each call to /recognize or /match consumes 1 scan credit. /detect (bounding box only, no card identification) does not consume credits. Credits reset on the 1st of each calendar month (UTC).

Supported Games

The scanner supports all 23 games. See the full list on Supported Games. Call GET /games for live status of each game's recognition database.

Supported Image Formats

JPG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC / HEIF (including iPhone photos shot in HEIC).

Maximum file size: 10 MB. For best results, ensure the card fills at least 25% of the image.

Error Responses

All errors follow this structure:

{ "detail": "Unsupported game: xyz" }