The Computer Vision workshop encourages you work out how to get a computer to recognize objects in an image. One of the fastest feedback loops for this is to use a webcam and you can see the setup above shows off the core of this workshop.

Bring your tablet or smartphone

We will have webcams on hand. Your laptop webcam may also be used. But this will work best if you have a second screen for the camera to look at. Bring your tablet or a smartphone along.

Premise

The beginnings of Computer Vision are all about recognizing patterns. As a working example we suggest building a bot that will play the game 2048 for you. This is pictured above and has several things going for it:

• a well-defined grid that makes it easy to recognize where the tiles are located
• Different background colors for different tile values

1. Install OpenCV: http://opencv.org/
2. Load up 2048 on your table or smartphone: http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/
3. Use OpenCV to grab an image from the web cam and recognize where each tile is located
4. Parse the values of each tile
5. Write logic that will tell you the best move to make next

Simple

• Face tracking (easy) and facial recognition (harder)
• Color tracking (bring along a tennis ball or other object for motion tracking)
• Handwriting recognition:
• The options are never-ending.