Greg Briggs' Technical Articles

Jigsaw puzzle pieces data set

By Greg Briggs

The data set represents a common problem while doing a 500+ piece jigsaw puzzle: You've gotten everything together except for 200 blue pieces that form the sky.

This very thing happened to me. So, I took an overhead picture of my coffee table containing the puzzle I was working on. I have captured all the pieces as well as the "sky hole" in the puzzle. I never did finish this puzzle.

Your goal is to figure out how to finish the puzzle by using some shape-fitting algorithm.

I have manually done some initial thresholding to give the shapes of the pieces and the shapes of the hole. I have also cut out a sample subset of the data for testing your algorithms. Note that the subset pieces do NOT fit into the subset puzzle.

This data may not be used for commercial purposes, as the original puzzle is copyrighted.

I've written some Java code to try to solve this but it hasn't solved it yet. If you email me I can send you a copy of my work in progress.

Download puzzle-dataset-1.0.zip