Where's Waldo? or Where's Wally? is a memorable book series that challenged many children and adults, all across the globe, to find him and his friends. While you used to spend hours with friends and family trying to find all of the hidden characters and items, now, there is a robot named 'There’s Waldo', which uses machine learning to get the job done.
The sole purpose of the robot, built by Redpepper, is to find Waldo/Wally and point him out. The robotic arm is controlled using a Raspberry Pi, making use of the pyarm Python library for the uARM Metal. Upon booting up, There's Waldo will extend its arm over the page of the book, take a photo, and use OpenCV to find faces. Once the faces are extracted from the page, they are sent to Google's Auto ML Vision service.
The service begins comparing all of the faces that are sent, against the one that it has been trained to find. If there is a match that it feels it is pretty confident about, with "confident" being 95 percent or higher, the arm on the robot will then proceed to point to the matching face. Redpepper states that if there were multiple Waldo/Wally faces on a page, There's Waldo would point out each one. As of now, it is just a prototype.
Source: Redpepper (YouTube) via The Verge
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