Programming potential never ceases to amaze me. I want to learn more. NOW!
You might want to check out ai-class.com - it includes an introduction to computer vision (and plenty of other cool stuff).
Where's Waldo?
11–20 of 32 posts
Re: Where's Waldo?
#12Amusing application, but I'd like to see the version that finds Waldo on the page in which everyone is wearing striped shirts
In most normal applications, the only thing that would change is what your features are. For example, if you wanted to find Waldo using the shape of his face and/or hat, you would probably just find some SIFT points (or something), and then build an eigenWaldoface, possibly using a PCA'd set of Waldo faces and hats as examples, and then SIFT the image and look for the places that are most like the eigenWaldoface. Thi…
Ha, I wasn't being a grump...these kinds of problems are An important party of the evidence in showing thre practicality and usefulness of code. I love it.
I mostly wanted to see who else remembered that particular Waldo puzzle...it was the final one in one of the books
Re: Where's Waldo?
#13This needs to be an augmented reality mobile app. The problem on the AI side of things is that a good algorithm that reliably "learns" what Waldo looks like would need a substantial number of examples.
A good solution to this would get close, then calculate the probabilities of every "maybe-waldo" and then display the one with the highest probability of being Waldo. An augmented reality app that highlighted Waldo on every page would be awesome.
Re: Where's Waldo?
#14Something unrelated but perhaps interesting to some people, "Waldo" is actually a localised name for the USA and Canada, his original name is Wally. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where%27s_Wally%3F
It brings me an almost indescribable joy to find that Wally is the original name. Yet I have no idea why. Waldo always seemed a bit of a strange name, and it still confuses me why it would be changed for the US market. Anyone know why (Wiki doesn't say).
Me too. Probably some committee or executive idea.
Re: Where's Waldo?
#15Something unrelated but perhaps interesting to some people, "Waldo" is actually a localised name for the USA and Canada, his original name is Wally. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where%27s_Wally%3F
It brings me an almost indescribable joy to find that Wally is the original name. Yet I have no idea why. Waldo always seemed a bit of a strange name, and it still confuses me why it would be changed for the US market. Anyone know why (Wiki doesn't say).
at a guess its for market differentiation. like how I get the "international" version of US textbooks, which are exactly the same but with a different cover on the front. Or how Harry Potters and the Philosophers Stone needed a title change to sell to US. Or how you can get adult and child versions of the Harry Potter books.
Re: Where's Waldo?
#16Something unrelated but perhaps interesting to some people, "Waldo" is actually a localised name for the USA and Canada, his original name is Wally. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where%27s_Wally%3F
It brings me an almost indescribable joy to find that Wally is the original name. Yet I have no idea why. Waldo always seemed a bit of a strange name, and it still confuses me why it would be changed for the US market. Anyone know why (Wiki doesn't say).
Gone with Where is Waldo?! The all new meta-existential gamebook Why is Waldo? is out now in your nearest bookshop!
I felt dirty with all the exclamation marks.
Re: Where's Waldo?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
In most normal applications, the only thing that would change is what your features are. For example, if you wanted to find Waldo using the shape of his face and/or hat, you would probably just find some SIFT points (or something), and then build an eigenWaldoface, possibly using a PCA'd set of Waldo faces and hats as examples, and then SIFT the image and look for the places that are most like the eigenWaldoface. Thi…
Ha, I wasn't being a grump...these kinds of problems are An important party of the evidence in showing thre practicality and usefulness of code. I love it. I mostly wanted to see who else remembered that particular Waldo puzzle...it was the final one in one of the books
I do. It took us an entire plane trip from Sacramento to Chicago to find him there :)
Re: Where's Waldo?
#18The algorithm described by Heike is essentially just looking for striped red and white shirts. Anyone who's done more than a couple of "Where's Waldo?" games knows that striped shirts are often thrown in to draw one's eye. In fact, in this very example there is another striped shirt (lower left corner, just above the wall) which could very well have been Waldo that this algorithm did not highlight. Without being able to recognize Waldo's human characteristics (thin, glasses, strong chin) the approach described will inevitably fail.
Re: Where's Waldo?
#19On NPR, this turns into: "an algorithm that can find Waldo in any image."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/waitwait/2011/12/18/143865340/the-w... via http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/116401/stack-overflo...
Re: Where's Waldo?
#20This needs to be an augmented reality mobile app. The problem on the AI side of things is that a good algorithm that reliably "learns" what Waldo looks like would need a substantial number of examples. A good solution to this would get close, then calculate the probabilities of every "maybe-waldo" and then display the one with the highest probability of being Waldo. An augmented reality app that highlighted Waldo on…
If you've got net access (or even if you don't), it seems almost plausible that you could just identify the book/page in question and use a lookup table of coordinates.
I don't know how many variations on the /Where's Wa[a-z]+\?/ theme have actually been produced, though, so maybe it wouldn't be easier.
Then again, if you can upload unknowns, wait until you've got enough samples to generate confidence, and then store the result, it'd scale/perform much better :)