- Everyone loves a good "Where's Waldo?" puzzle unless you can't actually find Waldo, then it starts to get frustrating.
- Don't feel too bad: One company actually built a robot that can find Waldo faster than most humans probably could.
- The robot, called "There's Waldo," uses computer vision and machine learning to spot Waldo it's been able to find the hidden character in as little as 4.5 seconds.
- Here's how "There's Waldo" works:
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This robot that can instantly find Waldo might be my favorite use of artificial intelligence yet
where's waldo robot ai
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If "Theres Waldo" can find a face in the puzzle with 95% confidence or higher, it will move its mechanical arm to point at any and all Waldos on the page with its creepy rubber hand.
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The robot arm, which is controlled by a tiny Raspberry Pi computer, was coded with Python to extend and take a photo of the "Wheres Waldo" puzzle.
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Once the photo of the puzzles been taken, the OpenCV computer vision service finds and separates all of the faces it can find on the page.
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At that point, those faces are sent off to Googles Cloud AutoML vision service, which compares each photo against its trained model of what Waldo looks like.
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Googles Cloud Auto ML service, which doesnt require any coding experience to use (its free to try), was trained to find Waldo by looking at dozens of pictures of the cartoon, which were all found on Google Image Search.
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If the service returns a match with confidence of 95% or higher, the robot arm is programmed to extend to the exact location of the face that matches Waldo, and point to it.
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redpepper says "Theres Waldo" is only a prototype, but its able to find Waldo on any page in as little as 4.45 seconds.
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Check out Theres Waldo in action below.
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