title: A new technique for solving puzzles.
abstract: This paper proposes a new technique for solving jigsaw puzzles. The novelty of the proposed technique is that it provides an automatic jigsaw puzzle solution without any initial restriction about the shape of pieces, the number of neighbor pieces, etc. The proposed technique uses both curve- and color-matching similarity features. A recurrent procedure is applied, which compares and merges puzzle pieces in pairs, until the original puzzle image is reformed. Geometrical and color features are extracted on the characteristic points (CPs) of the puzzle pieces. CPs, which can be considered as high curvature points, are detected by a rotationally invariant corner detection algorithm. The features which are associated with color are provided by applying a color reduction technique using the Kohonen self-organized feature map. Finally, a postprocessing stage checks and corrects the relative position between puzzle pieces to improve the quality of the resulting image. Experimental results prove the efficiency of the proposed technique, which can be further extended to deal with even more complex jigsaw puzzle problems.
authors.affiliation: Image Processing and Multimedia Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Democritus University of Thrace, 67100 Xanthi, Greece. mmakridi@ee.duth.gr
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Makridis
authors.forename: Nikos
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Papamarkos
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D005716:Game Theory; D008962:Models, Theoretical