Tweets.  I has them.

Hmmm…  It appears that there are only 13 tweets from Palin, even though it says there should be 15.  I guess the search quit halfway through, just like she did.

Anyway, now I just need to grab a whole bunch of these and index them and see what comes out.

Each Crazy Weekend Project has a crazy goal they’re aiming for.  The first was to get a perfect game in Pong.  The second was to eliminate Wesley Crusher.  For this one, it’s joining the Bucket Brigade.

Part of what set Activision apart, aside from making awesome games, was that for pretty much every game, you could get a patch to prove that you’d obtained some high score.  Just snap a picture of your score, mail it in, and a few weeks later, you’d get three inch trophy to commemorate your achievement for free.  Some games had multiple patches for different difficulty levels.

For Kaboom!, you could get the Activision Bucket Brigade patch for a score of 3000 or higher.  To reach this level, you had to be good, but you didn’t have to be perfect.  An ordinary player would be able to get this score, given enough practice.

My primary goal for this weekend is to build a robot capable of getting a score in Kaboom! that will qualify it to join the Bucket Brigade.  I’ll then send a picture in to Activision and see what happens…

The spirit of these patches lives on in the XBox 360 and PS3.  Games for those systems feature Achievements or Trophies which you get for doing something specific in the game.  However, instead of having just one, games will typically have up to 50.  And, unfortunately, they’re all electronic, so you can’t show them off.

Images in action:

Target Acquired

Multiple hits.  Note that it doesn’t see Geordi…  I think the face detector relies heavily on the eyes, so his VISOR is confusing it.

It can even detect redshirts!

IT WORKS!

HOLY CRAP IT ACTUALLY WORKS!

I trained it on a set of about half of the images, because it takes a long time to train.  Then I ran it on the video and it was actually returning the right person most of the time.  I’m actually shocked that it’s working so well, especially seeing that this is the first time I’ve had the recognition part actually compiling and running.  No real tweaking necessary.  The problems I’ve been having have all been with calling the functions and simply using the library, it’s not that the software was doing what I told it to do and it all came out wrong.

Looking at this trace, you can even get a sense of the cuts in the scene:

Recognized: JeanLucPicard
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: JeanLucPicard
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: JeanLucPicard
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: Anthwarta
Recognized: Anthwarta
Recognized: Anthwarta
Recognized: Anthwarta
Recognized: Anthwarta
Recognized: Anthwarta
Recognized: Anthwarta
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: JeanLucPicard
Recognized: JeanLucPicard
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: JeanLucPicard
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: JeanLucPicard
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: JeanLucPicard
Recognized: DeannaTroi
Recognized: JeanLucPicard
Recognized: Anthwarta
Recognized: Anthwarta
Recognized: Anthwarta
Recognized: Anthwarta

Of course, right now, it’s only working on the positive cases.  When it knows someone, it knows them.  When it doesn’t know someone, it randomly guesses about who it is.

Now, something interesting about that…  I haven’t trained the system on Wesley yet.  He’s down in the Ws and the images I trained with were alphabetical.  However, in the scenes with him, he’s fairly regularly identified as “JeanLucPicard”.

Gotta wonder if the Doctor and the Captain have something they need to talk to him about…

Now I just have to label the faces on the screen, since screenshots are better than random text.

And with that, I’m declaring Crazy Project Weekend complete.  All in all, it was a success, although there were some things that didn’t work out.  I started on Friday morning with nothing but an idea and ended up successfully building a robot that could win a game of Pong, despite never having touched most of the major technologies (OpenCV, Mindstorms, Bluetooth) prior to this weekend.

I’m definitely going to have to do this sort of thing more often.

Just a reminder, the source code, if you’re interested, is available in SVN:  https://mathpirate.net/svn/

And now…  Sleep.

Booyah!  Chew on that, Stella!