A New Technique for Solving a Jigsaw Puzzle

A new technique for solving jigsaw puzzles is proposed, which takes advantage of both geometrical and color features. It is considered that an image is being divided into a number of pieces (sub-images). The proposed technique is based on extraction of a set of boundary characteristic points and on a Kohonen self-organized feature map (KSOFM) color reduction technique. For each characteristic point a set of color and geometrical features are extracted. The technique compares these sets of features and decides whether two sub-images match or not. When a matching pair has been found, a corrective procedure is applied in order for these sub-images to fit exactly. Next, the proposed technique creates a new sub-image, which consists of the two matched sub-images. The whole matching procedure is being repeated until only one sub-image remains or no more matching sub-images can be found.