I recently noticed this new submission on the File Exchange by none other than one of the prolific newsgroup contributors, Image Analyst. Being a fan of puzzles myself, I was delighted to see the use of image processing to solve some mazes.
Contents
Sample Solution
Here's a picture of a sample maze solution.
Method
Instead of doing traditional actions like move right until hitting a dead end, the maze solver here uses image processing concepts such as morphological operations (e.g., dilation and erosion), thresholding, and sectioning an image into "blobs." Reading and understanding the code provided me with a fun way to reinforce the application of these image processing concepts.
Other "Games" to Learn From?
Do you know of other MATLAB-based games or puzzles where understanding the code might provide insight into some computing domain for users? If so, let us know here.
Get
the MATLAB code
Published with MATLAB® 7.10
The file is very interesting and nice!
Indeed quite an original way to solve the maze problem, which helps to clarify the concept of erosion, dilation and other image processing functions.
Nevertheless, I find the style of writing a single long script a bit problematic.
I can think of at least 2 separate independent functions here:
1) Get the image from disk.
2) Solve the problem on a given image.
What If I want to run the maze solver on image not from disk? I would have to dig up the code and find which part does this functionality and create my own function. Quite a painful process.
Hello Loren
Yes indeed, great submission.
Look also at what Cris Luengo has published on his image processign blog.
http://www.cb.uu.se/~cris/blog/index.php/archives/277
Matteo
These guy’s work is also fascinating
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/projects/mazes/
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/papers/xu_kaplan_siggraph2007.pdf