Backgammon checkers and dice detection
Is this feasible ( i guess yes )?


Yes


  Has anyone an idea of the effort i can expect to get this done. If it fits my budget i would like to start a freelance project...


The main tool you are going to need is the Hough Transform. Out of the box, the Hough Transform converts straight lines to points (I will talk about circles in a minute). Therefore, the task of detecting the frame of the board and the lanes becomes trivial.

Detecting the pawns, is also trivial with the circle Hough transform. In this case, we are looking for stable configurations of strong point features at some radius.

Detecting the dice is also trivial, especially for "proper" dice (with dots, not numbers), with a simple normalised cross correlation application.

The main challenge of the whole thing is getting rid of perspective. It doesn't create a huge amount of problems as it simply distorts (in a predictable way) the points where the Hough Transform is maximal. But to keep things simple it would be good if you were to use a top-bottom looking camera. So, the camera is looking the board vertically, from above.

Another thing that will help immensely in discriminating your desireable targets is thresholding followed by edge detection. In fact, this step will improve the output of the Hough Transform too.

Hope this helps.