By Kayla Jardine/Joe Cingrana
A childhood game just became a robot’s easiest task.
Creative agency Redpepper created an artificial intelligence that’s been trained to spot Waldo in the iconic kids book ‘Where’s Waldo’ in under 4.5 seconds.
The AI, aptly named ‘There’s Waldo,’ was fed 107 images of Waldo from Google Images and is linked to Google’s AutoML Vision service to help spot the hidden man. The robot’s mechanical arm has a camera attached to snap pictures of the book and once the machine is 95% sure it’s Waldo, a rubber hands points to him.
Developer Matt Reed explained how it all works to Radio.com: "The AI is powered by the Google AutoML Vision service which just went into public beta this summer. It is a tool that allows mortals like myself to leverage state-of-the-art Machine Learning. You 'train' the system on what you want it to learn, like Waldo's face. Just upload batch of various Waldo face images and the AI "learns" what Waldo's face looks like. It's all browser-based so anyone can just drag and drop the photos into the system. Once it knows what Waldo looks like you can then ask the AI if any new image (like the image of the Waldo pages from the camera) contains a Waldo and it will return a confidence rating on how certain there is a Waldo in the image. I use that value (over 0.95) to consider a face a match with Waldo. Then I just move the robot arm to the position the face was seen."
Seems like a lot, right. Well, you're right. Reed's 15 year background in design and programming certainly helps. "I'm currently a Creative Technologist at a creative services agency in Nashville, TN," says Reed. "In order to keep up with what all is out there and how it could apply to our clients I'm constantly trying out new tech. I knew of Amazon's Rekognition service that could identify celebrities in photos but for some reason the first thing popped in my head was 'yeah, but can it identify cartoon celebrities, aka Waldo?' It doesn't so I that meant I had to roll my own and I've been wanting to try out Google's AutoML Vision service. It gave me a chance to kick the wheels and see what it was all about. It surprised me to say the least."
If this classic game wasn’t outdated already, this AI will have future generations asking ‘who’s Waldo?’