using artificial intelligence, creative ad agency redpepper has developed a facial recognition robot capable of identifying and pointing to waldo, with a top speed clocked at 4.45 seconds. named ‘there’s waldo,’ the robot tests google’s new autoML vision service, equipped with an arm that is controlled by raspberry pi along with a pyarm python library for the uarm metal.
robot wheres waldo
the robot takes images stored in google’s new autoML vision service as a learning platform to identify waldo

 

 

essentially, the arm extends, takes a picture of the canvas below, then uses openCV to find and extract faces from the photo. these faces are then sent to the google autoML vision service, which compares each face against the waldo model it has learned to identify. in an email interview with the verge, matt reed, the creative technologist at redpepper who led the project, explained that ‘there’s waldo’ built a data model training set of only ‘62 distinct waldo heads and 45 waldo heads plus body.‘

robot wheres waldo
the robot takes an image of the entire canvas and cross references the faces from learning model

 

 

if the robot has a confidence match of 95% or higher, the arm is instructed to extend and ‘point’ to the coordinates of the matching face on the canvas. if there are multiple waldos in a photo it will point to each one.