Jigsolved: Computer Vision to Solve Jigsaw Puzzles | Hacker News Reader

Jigsolved: Computer Vision to Solve Jigsaw Puzzles

blog.cornelltech.io

49 pointsbenryon13 comments

That has always been one of those pet projects I keep meaning to take another crack at. Once a year or so I spend a weekend toying around with opencv in python and see what I can do.

Unlike the parent post I've always wanted to solve it geometrically, not visually. Think solving a puzzle from the backs of the pieces.

I suspect that'd be much much harder - there's not that much variation between the shapes.

And some puzzles (excluding borders might actually have their pieces cut identically.

I actually did this once, with a 100 piece puzzle. It took about an hour. There were several pairs of pieces that looked like they fit, and even felt almost right, but weren't correct. It might be possible with computer vision, as long as you set the right tolerance of how tightly the pieces should fit together.

This is a field of active research, with wildly varying approaches.

For example, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225796422_Solving_j... uses puzzle shapes only, and http://webee.technion.ac.il/~ayellet/Ps/15-PT.pdf works with square pieces.

(both randomly picked from a google search; I don’t know what the state of the art is, and am still looking for the smartphone app that does this)

Can it solve this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_II_puzzle

If you have a picture of the solution it can tell you how to put the pieces yes.

Does not really solve puzzles. Just locates a single piece with sift.

I agree it's hardly a complete solution but it's like 70% of it, right? Especially if the goal was just to build a human aide.

That said, it's going to fail hard if your puzzle is a magic eye puzzle.

If the last 10% takes 90% of the time, well, this is only 70%.

Do most people keep the solution visible while solving a jigsaw?

http://archive.darpa.mil/shredderchallenge/ was pretty cool, in a related note.

Does this remind anyone else of Snow Crash? :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com