A metaheuristic approach for solving jigsaw puzzles

Puzzle solving is the art of pattern recognition which has found many applications in different areas such as restoration and reconstruction of archeological findings, repairing of broken objects, solving jigsaw puzzles, molecular docking problem, etc. There are two inherent problems in solving a general jigsaw puzzle; one is how to search through possible arrangements efficiently. The other one is devising some piece matching technique. To our best knowledge, current literature lacks a thorough investigation of the first problem. This paper investigates this problem in depth. Furthermore, different metaheuristic approaches to solve this problem are explored.