Waldo-finding robot

There’s Waldo. © Redpepper.

“Where’s Waldo?” is a series of picture books created by Martin Handford. The idea is to find the main character, Waldo, in an image. The problem is that each image is crammed with hundreds of people and objects, making it tough to quickly find Waldo, and keeping the kids engrossed for hours. Now, Matt Reed has developed a robot that finds Waldo. The robot has a robotic arm, the uArm Swift Pro, controlled by a Raspberry Pi. The camera takes a picture of the page and uses OpenCV to pick out the faces in the image. It then send them for analysis to Google’s AutoML Vision, which has been trained up on Waldo cartoons. If the robot finds a match with 95% confidence, the arm points to Waldo. And it works very well: Waldo is fingered in 5 seconds or less. Which kind of defeats the purpose of Where’s Waldo.

⇨ Circuit Breaker, “This robot uses AI to find Waldo, thereby ruining Where’s Waldo.”