I wanted to cook venison from scratch, which meant learning to shoot, which meant keeping track of my progress, which meant porting a 2012 OpenCV paper and training a state-of-the-art computer vision model, which meant the dinner took a bit longer than expected.

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An iOS engineer documents building a shooting target scoring app to replace manual brass gauges at a rifle range. Starting with Apple's Vision framework, he ported a 2012 OpenCV paper on target scoring, then combined it with a fine-tuned YOLOv8 model for bullet hole detection. The pipeline uses OpenCV for geometric analysis (ring detection, perspective transform) and YOLOv8 for hole localisation, with the final CoreML model weighing 22.4 MB. Beyond basic scoring, the app enables trend analysis across sessions, cumulative heat maps, and per-rifle performance comparisons. The project shipped as an offline-first iOS app on the App Store.

My Phone Replaced a Brass Plug