Shape Recognition

I find some of the concepts behind artificial intelligence such as shape recognition and human interaction amazing. A few months ago I saw a program called Big Ideas on TV by James May which talked about some of the worlds most intelligent human like robots. One of the most influential pioneer in the field is Professor Ishiguro from Osaka Japan who has produced some unbelievably lifelike robots; one of which can be seen standing next to him in the photo below:

But which one is he?! Anyway on James May's Big Ideas, one robot stuck me in particular. A robot called Asimo. Asimo was originally created by Honda and there are several versions of the creature around. One of these has the ability to walk and move around almost exactly like a human being, including being able to walk up and down stairs and even run! This is all well and good but how am I going to integrate that into a flash experiment!? The Asimo on which my next project is based has the ability to see. It does this through a complex form of shape analysis of data captured by two cameras in its head. Not only can Asimo "see" preprogrammed shapes but it can learn patterns in what it sees and use the patterns to determine what things that it may never even have seen before could be. It can also link objects it sees to words and phrases which describe them, so there is at least a small degree of human interaction.

To the flash project! A lot of people have a webcam these days so I thought it might be cool to try something similar. Nothing too complicated at first.

Now the experiment requires a few green shapes, so it might be a good idea to print out the following, or if you are the owner of a mobile phone with a large screen just load up the images onto that, and that should work as well! The three shapes the camera can detect are below. A circle, a triangle and a rectangle. I chose these as virtually every other shape we see can be made up of some combination of these.

Once you have printed these images out and ideally separated them, we can begin. Below is the flash movie:

click here to launch it

Obviously this is no Asimo; firstly it is colour blind and anyone wearing a green jumper then being accused of being a rectangle should be aware of this by now, secondly it can't actually learn the shapes, it simply uses an algorithm to determine the shape by calculating the number of corners it has, or in the case of the circle by colour subtraction.

Having said that its not a bad shot. A nice little feature I've added is that the program can determine when you hold up too many green shapes resulting in a rather disgruntled tone saying: "Please only show me one shape at a time". In order to have a fully functional shape detector however an algorithm would have to be determined to find co-ordinates for all the lines and vertices in an image, calculate all colour bounding shapes and so on. Not so easy in flash, but it might be doable.

Oh and the voice is recorded from textEdit's speech function on my computer and isn't my own.

Enjoy!