How do I find Waldo with Mathematica?

Abstraction: Computer vision approach to locating Waldo using color and shape features

Key points:

• Waldo's striped shirt pattern alone is unreliable because the stripe is sometimes broken up in illustrations
• Proposed multi-cue approach: red-white stripe block (~2:1 ratio), glasses (two circles 0.5:1 above stripe), blue pants (below stripe), red-white hat (above head), dark hair, and shoe color
• White balance and red balance normalization needed since images may be scans with color shifts
• Person height estimation via random sampling of figure outlines to establish scale, then filter for Waldo's skinny ~5:1 or 6:1 height-to-width ratio
• Algorithm pipeline: isolate Waldo-red areas → skeletonize → prune to points → cross-reference with hair, pants, shoes, hat, glasses color regions
• Negative checks (e.g., blue apron too close to shoes) help eliminate false positives like apron-wearing figures

Connections: Stack Overflow · Mathematica · Image Processing · Computer Vision · Pattern Recognition

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8479058/how-do-i-find-waldo-with-mathematica?rq=1