Finding Waldo in Where’s Waldo can be a fun collaborative activity which gets progressively harder as you flip the pages. If you’ve ever wanted a simpler way of finding Waldo that involved no effort whatsoever from you then you’re going to like this report. Redpepper, a creative agency, has developed a robot which uses artificial intelligence to find Waldo. The robot even has a silicone hand that will point to Waldo on the page.
The robot is called There’s Waldo and it’s capable of finding the character with impressive accuracy. The robotic arm is a Raspberry Pi-controlled uArm Swift Pro that’s backed up with a Vision Camera Kit which enables facial recognition. It does that by first taking a photo of the page and then using OpenCV to find faces that could be Waldo in the photo.
The faces that are a match are sent to Google’s AutoML Vision service for analysis. The service has been trained on photos of Waldo. Once the robot can find a match with 95 percent confidence or higher, it will point to Waldo on the page.
Unless you build such a robot yourself, nobody is going to sell this robot in stores to take the fun out of patiently scanning the book’s pages to find Waldo. It does show the capabilities of Google’s AutoML Vision service which enables users to train their own artificial intelligence tools even if they don’t know how to code.
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