Why would a programmer ever sit around and search for Waldo, when they could just program a computer to do it?
That’s exactly what Stack Overflow user Heike did!
Here’s a basic outline of how it works:
First, he filtered out all of the colors that aren’t red. Next, he calculated the correlation of the Waldo scene to a black and white image in order to find the red and white transitions in Waldo’s iconic shirt. Then, he picks out the pixels in that image that were found to have a high correlation, and draws a white circle around them. He had to fidget with the level of the image, as when it is too high, the code identifies false positives.
Finally, he compares the image the code was working on — the compared one — and joins it to the original Waldo scene.
Pretty crazy, right?
With over 500 upvotes, this Mathematica driven bit on Stack Overflow has certainly turned a few heads.
Now, if they could just program something to find my car keys …
[via Geek O System]
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