This Hilarious Raspberry Pi Project Can Find Waldo In Seconds – SlashGear

The objective of a lot of AI projects is to save time spent on mundane pursuits. While the venerable Where’s Waldo is anything but mundane, it can be time-consuming. With this in mind, Redpepper, a strategic & creative marketing agency, modified a uArm Swift Pro in the most hilarious way. Armed with a camera powered by Raspberry Pi (coding via Python), it can pinpoint that wily Waldo wherever he may be hiding on a page. It can literally point him out, too, because it’s outfitted with a little hand attachment.

How was There’s Waldo taught to locate its nemesis so effectively? Through AutoML Vision. Matt Reed of Redpepper explained to The Verge, “I got all of the Waldo training images from Google Image Search; 62 distinct Waldo heads and 45 Waldo heads plus body.” The thing about Waldo, of course, is that he’s so distinctively different from his surroundings in his iconic bright outfit that he’s easily identified once located.

The AI cross-references its knowledge of Waldo’s appearance with what it “sees” in the book, analyzes for matches, and then finds Waldo. Functionally, it’s closely inspecting the scene just as a human would, but Reed noted that thanks to OpenCV, the robot could very efficiently spot Waldo types that weren’t included in the images it was fed. In short, it does the job better and more efficiently than previously expected, a common trend in AI.