Sitting down to begin work on a jigsaw puzzle is an exciting but daunting experience.
The difficulty of a jigsaw puzzle and how long it takes to put it together is directly related to the number of pieces there are in the puzzle.
Plus, there are two factors that account for the complexity of such puzzles: the formation of the pieces and the die you use, as well as the contrast of the puzzle image.
The formation of the pieces and the die you use depends on how the puzzle was created, whether by the developer of the app or manufacturer.
The contrast of the puzzle, on the other hand, is about the definition of the strokes and colors it has. The more defined the diversity, the faster and easier it is to assemble.
Besides how you solve the puzzle, another important factor is the platform on which you do the puzzle. These days, you can solve puzzles online unlike in the past, where puzzles were physically solved.
If you’re wondering how to solve jigsaw-type puzzles online – whether you’re using a web-based software or mobile app, here are the best jigsaw puzzle solver apps you can try.
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Best Jigsaw Puzzle Solver Apps
1. ASolver
ASolver is a mobile jigsaw puzzle solver app that uses your device’s camera to recognize and solve puzzles.
The app solves puzzles like Rubik’s cube, which have different patterns, Pocket Cube, Rubik’s Revenge, Professor’s Cube, V-Cube6, Megaminx, Skewb, Pyraminx, Tower, Domino, and more, which the developer adds as they’re created.
For Pyraminx and Skewb, ASolver finds a solution with just a few moves. For Rubik’s Cubes, ASolver offers solutions that are very close to optimal.
For instance, 4x4x4 Rubik’s Cube puzzles are solved in 50 moves, 5x5x5 are solved in 85 moves, 6x6x6 puzzles are solved in 140 moves, and Megaminx puzzles in 130 moves.
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2. Abto Software
Abto Software is powered by computer vision to help you solve puzzles through image processing. You can solve classic jigsaw puzzles that prove a challenge for you to complete using computer science pattern recognition or image processing.
This particular application is developed to automatically assemble jigsaw puzzles. It has a number of potential applications, including reassembling or stitching images together, giving meaning to them, and recognizing objects with the highest accuracy.
The program assembles your puzzle from the image of its pieces and comprises modules like puzzle cropper, aligner, rotator, or joiner, locks searcher, color descriptor, and an animation module.
Each of these modules works together towards solving the puzzle and giving you the final result. For instance, the cropper detects and removes background colors that allow you to create an inverted mask for the puzzle while the locks searcher interlocks and aligns them with the algorithm, so it’s easier to solve later on.
The puzzle rotator randomly rotates the puzzle pieces in different orientations by four quadrantal angles, while the puzzle joiner assembles the puzzle from its preprocessed pieces and deletes unnecessary copies.
Finally, the color descriptor estimates the color match and compiles a rating of the best-fit puzzles, and the animation module creates a visual representation of the achieved result – the complete puzzle.
3. UnPuzzled
This is a jigsaw puzzle solver that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve puzzles. The app has a web app based on one of the solvers. The app consists of creation and solving components, and a checking adjacency component for the puzzle pieces.
Once the app gets your jigsaw puzzle, it takes the image and cuts it up into a uniform square with the puzzle pieces, each of them being a specific dimension.
The app then rotates the squares counterclockwise and shuffles them up to create a puzzle. Plus, it uses non-machine learning and machine learning models that detect if two puzzle pieces are adjacent or they’re not.
The app also uses a puzzle pieces pair generator to create custom datasets for these models. It takes actual images to construct the puzzle from the CUB-200 dataset, splitting them into training, test, and validation portions to check the adjacency of the models.
Finally, it creates a search algorithm, which takes a puzzle board and looks for the best pieces to fit until it solves the puzzle completely. It will create solvers that integrate the models and compare all the pieces to give you a completely solved puzzle.
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4. Jigidi Puzzles
Jigidi Puzzles offers fast help when you want to solve jigsaw puzzles. Initially, the app used userscript to automatically solve puzzles. However, with further development and evolution, the current version of the app works to make it hard to solve the puzzles.
It uses a WebSocket connection to tell the server how it moves pieces around and connected to one another and the server sends back a “you’ve solved it” message after detecting that the pieces are arranged in the right configuration.
Once you start the puzzle, you can drag-and-drop pieces and the app will lock together those that are connected. However, both pieces have to be visible for the process to be successful.
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5. Zolver
Zolver is another jigsaw puzzle solver developed by 4 EPITA students and written in Python language. The app solves both real and computer-generated jigsaw puzzles.
The project was developed on a Linux distro, so it’s not guaranteed for use on computers running Windows operating system. To avoid compatibility issues, you can set up a virtual environment and use some commands to solve your jigsaw puzzle.
The app applies a binary threshold to the processed image that differs from the real puzzle and then uses mathematical morphologies to link edges. Next, it finds the edges of each puzzle piece and computes the relative angle to get local extrema and adjacent points.
Once it splits the edges, it classifies them into three categories, including indent padding, frame, and outdent padding edges.
To match these edges, the app compares the size of the edges to find similar lengths, uses color to match the edges, and uses a Euclidean distance to compare the shapes along the edges.
The more edges the app checks, the more likely it can match the pieces and give you a solution without errors. Zolver always tries to fill the empty spaces with the highest number of already-filled edges to give you a completely solved puzzle.
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Wrapping Up
Sitting down to work on a jigsaw puzzle online is challenging yet exhilarating. It improves hand-eye coordination, visual acuity, color and shape identification, and patience.
Your mind can wander while your hands and eyes are busy with construction, plus you get a satisfying reward each time you fit a piece, which becomes a continuous session of good feelings.
No doubt jigsaw puzzles are addictive and never age with time. If you do not have the time to solve one, you no longer have to worry about that.
If you’ve tried different strategies to solve jigsaw puzzles of all sizes, but you can’t find any, you probably need a jigsaw puzzle solver app.
These jigsaw puzzle apps are easily accessible and downloadable on your device, and you can quickly and easily solve them without losing a piece. If you can’t play online, some of these apps offer offline functionality, so you can access the games anywhere and anytime.
Scott L. Macarthur is a marketing consultant and an online author. He is mostly engaged in providing his expertise to startups and SMBs. He is also an author on TheNextWeb.