A small San Francisco-based team has won DARPA's Shredder Challenge, 33 days after it was launched.
The Shredder Challenge comprised five separate puzzles in which the number of documents, the document subject matter and the method of shredding were varied to present challenges of increasing difficulty.
To complete each problem, participants were required to provide the answer to a puzzle embedded in the content of the reconstructed document.
The "All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S." team, which won a $50,000 prize for its efforts, did so using custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms.
In total, the winning team spent nearly 600 man-hours developing the algorithms and piecing together documents that were shredded into more than 10,000 pieces.
Almost 9,000 teams registered to participate in the competition.
-- By Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design
