Slashdot Mirror
Webcam Jigsaw Solver in 200 Lines of Python
leighklotz writes "Jeff Breidenbach and 200 lines of Python code have brought us the Glyphsaw Puzzle solver. Hold a puzzle piece up to a webcam, and the display sgiws exactly where in the puzzle the piece belongs. The solver uses the Python Imaging Library (PIL), Numerical Python, and the PARC DataGlyph Toolkit. By the way, you can make your own DataGlyphs."
Oh, but I bet it uses a bunch of libraries post.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
exactly where the 'h' and 'o' keys are.
70e808a22cb027cde4a6abddf6435d55
Shouldn't this news be under programming instead of software? The image for programming is a jigsaw getting solved!
Google Search: sgiws
Did you mean: shows
The shareholder is always right.
Big deal. I can write the same thing in C in a single line of code. Oh but you have to link in 100,000,000 lines of libraries and include files, but that doesn't seem to count...
A "jigsaw" is a nifty tool that dances around a pattern in a sheet of wood, a narrow saw band that cuts like a laser along curves (OK, compared to its 19th Century prececesors). A "jigsaw puzzle" is a puzzle made by jigsawing a picture, and putting it back together along its deceptively simple interlocking contours. This device substitutes an AI scanner for the saw, in inverse operation to the jigsaw. So, if anything, it's a "Jiglyph", not a "Glyphsaw" - unless they mean that it "saw" the "glyph".
--
make install -not war
Oh, and I also think it's pretty stupid to talk about how few lines it took to write the program when it's using a bunch of libraries. I could just write a one-liner that calls this program, by that rationale.
Here's the Artificial Intelligence Tetris I was mentioning.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
This glyph thing is all very nice and all, but it CHEATS. The puzzle is specially printed and each piece has a unique address. Where's the challenge in that?
NOW if they could do this with an off the Walmart shelf puzzle, THAT would be something.
The technology is that they can embed arbitrary digital information into arbitrary images, and do it in such a way that it's resistant to errors, damage, blurriness and other rigors of the real world.
If you have a jigsaw made using this technology where the embedded data indicates the location within the original image, you can use this software to decode that data and display where the piece should go. It doesn't look at the actual image at all, and thus wouldn't help you solve any 'normal' jigsaws, or do any sort of general image recognition.
It does use some similar techniques to facial recognition to identify the intersection points and enable the glyph decoding, but that's all.
Neat, but not amazing. You have to read the article to realize that the system only works if all the puzzle pieces have been printed with special marks, DataGlyphs. It's like printing registration marks on all the pieces. Sort of. The dataglyphs actually have more interesting properties, but the point is that this isn't the vision system you expect. It isn't even a general puspose puzzle solving system. As soon as the system recognizes the glyph marks it knows exactly where the piece belongs. It doesn't "solve" anything. It doesn't have to figure out where the pieces go. You couldn't show it pieces from a puzzle off the shelf and have it solve it.
Somebody please amend the OP. When the site finishes melting down no one will have a clue what this is about:
Essentially it is just a bunch of puzzle pieces with 2-D barcodes printed on them, and a computer+webcam+python used as a barcode reader.
(oh, and as a bonus, the 2-D barcodes are somewhat colored so that it looks like a picture from a distance.)
It is no more a "Jigsaw Puzzle Solver" than a locomotive's wheels are an autopilot decive. They each achieve the end goal only when the rails have been laid in advance.
-CV
I liked them better when they were called "two-dimensional bar codes".
/. post is a little misleading by the way... the webcam and software doesn't "solve" the jigsaw puzzle, it just reads the coordinates which are encoded on each piece.
This
You wanna repeat this experiment at home? Buy a small jigsaw puzzle. Solve it. Label each piece with it's (x,y) coordinate in the solved puzzle. For instance, top-left could be (1,1), the one to its immediate right could be (2,1), and so on.
Then take the puzzle apart and AMAZE your friends when you can deduce the position of each piece simply by HOLDING IT UP TO YOUR EYES!
Yep, and it's not only closed source, it's proprietary; to develop for it, you need to buy the eval kit and license the technology.
Furthermore, not a single slashdot reader seems to have noticed that the article is one giant piece of astroturf. The submitter's website plainly lists his address in Palo Alto, which just happens to be the site of PARC, the Xerox research center that developed the technology. Coincidence? I seriously doubt it.
Oh, and this technology is mostly used in color copiers for printing out the machine's serial number in pure yellow so you can't see it..but the document can be traced back to you (this is supposedly for the Secret Service to chase down people making color copies of US currency and whatnot, but that's a bullshit excuse now that these copiers all have currency detectors and refuse to copy currency). They don't point it out specifically, but there are various hints dropped in the FAQ about it.
Please help metamoderate.