Kyle
We’re not sure if this is a case of pure boredom or pure genius however programmers over at the site stackoverflow have found a way to use software to find Waldo. The software program they used is called Mathmatica and the programmer’s who participated in this amazing feat collaborated. Stack Overflow user Heike’s solution worked.
Geekosystem explains in as close to layman’s terms as possible, just how Heike was able to crack the mystery of finding Waldo:
“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.”
Although it’s not foolproof it’s very interesting that they were able to accomplish this. We were able to confirm from another graphic programmer that it would be nearly impossible to use any kind of facial or image recognition program to find Waldo since he is an illustration and not an actual photograph. Also as we all know the iconic “Where’s Waldo” drawings are originally hand drawn wich makes every possible Waldo different than the previous one.
source: Stack Overflow via Geekosystem
