A Where's Waldo-spotting robot, using a learning artificial intelligence program, can spot the cartoon traveler on a page in seconds, making child's play out of the children's game, the tech website Gizmodo reported Thursday.
The creative agency RedPepper created the robot not necessarily to steal the joy of children who find it fun finding the "Where's Waldo?" character on book pages, but to demonstrate the improving ability of machine learning artificial intelligence, Gizmodo noted.
The object of the "Where's Waldo?" children's books is to find the small red striped-wardrobe wearing Waldo in a sea of other cartoon faces and illustrations on each page, according to the website Metal Floss.
RedPepper's "There's Waldo" robot points out the character with a hand built on the computer. An OpenCV is used to find and extract faces from a photo of the page, which are then sent to the Google Auto ML Vision service. The service then compares each one of the photos against the Waldo model the computer has been trained to identify, the RedPepper statement said.
All of this happens in seconds, and when the service is 95 percent confident or higher of its match, its robot arm reaches out and point to where Waldo can be found, RedPepper said. The computer has been able to find Waldo's face on a crowded page in an average of less than five seconds.
"While only a prototype, the fastest There's Waldo has pointed out a match has been 4.45 seconds which is better than most 5-year-olds," the RedPepper statement said.
The robot is controlled by the Raspberry Pi computer, a credit-credit size device that is being used in various electronic devices and can already perform most desktop computer functions like spreadsheets, word processing, browsing the internet, playing games and playing high-definition videos, according to its website.
The computer is now being used by adults and children worldwide to learn programming and digital making, its website added.
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said last year that the industry to moving even faster toward AI as the technology rapidly improves.
"We are now witnessing a new shift in computing: the move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world," Pichai said in a Google blog. "And as before, it is forcing us to reimagine our products for a world that allows a more natural, seamless way of interacting with technology.
"… Thanks to advances in deep learning, we're able to make images, photos and videos useful to people in a way they simply haven't been before. Your camera can 'see:' you can speak to your phone and get answers back—speech and vision are becoming as important to computing as the keyboard or multi-touch screens," he continued.
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