Show And Tell: Sikuli - Pattern-Matching And Automation

SikuliX is very unusual - a scripting/automation technology that relies on pattern matching, and is available for use via Python or Java. Developed at the User Interface Design Group at MIT, is a powerful and easy-to-use technology that uses image recognition to automate just about anything that appears on-screen.

Sikuli is rather hard to slot - it offers all of the functionality of an automation or scripting tool, but it also offers some powerful and very novel image-matching functionality for truly novel use-cases that revolve around image search. In addition it has an OCR-mode, in which image matches are performed after converting those image patterns to text. This gives rise to some pretty new applications.

The OCR-functionality is powered by Tesseract, an open-source optical character recognition engine whose development is sponsored by Google.

Using discussion forums

Please use the discussion forums on this course to engage with other students and to help each other out. Unfortunately, much as we would like to, it is not possible for us at Loonycorn to respond to individual questions from students:-(

We're super small and self-funded with only 2 people developing technical video content. Our mission is to make high-quality courses available at super low prices.

The only way to keep our prices this low is to *NOT offer additional technical support over email or in-person*. The truth is, direct support is hugely expensive and just does not scale.

We understand that this is not ideal and that a lot of students might benefit from this additional support. Hiring resources for additional support would make our offering much more expensive, thus defeating our original purpose.

It is a hard trade-off.

Thank you for your patience and understanding!

Yep! Automation testers and folks look to automate repetitive tasks

Yep! Data professionals looking to extract hard-to-pull data

Yep! Business professionals looking to dynamically update models they've built

Absolutely basic Python or Java programming ability

Automate data-pulls from sites and sources that block other scripting tools

 Generate alerts based on Facebook/Skype and other hard-to-detect events

 Search large PDFs for images that "look like" the one you are searching for