Representing and solving a maze given an image

This solution is written in Python. Thanks Mikhail for the pointers on the image preparation.

An animated Breadth-First Search:

The Completed Maze:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys

from Queue import Queue
from PIL import Image

start = (400,984)
end = (398,25)

def iswhite(value):
    if value == (255,255,255):
        return True

def getadjacent(n):
    x,y = n
    return [(x-1,y),(x,y-1),(x+1,y),(x,y+1)]

def BFS(start, end, pixels):

    queue = Queue()
    queue.put([start]) # Wrapping the start tuple in a list

    while not queue.empty():

        path = queue.get() 
        pixel = path[-1]

        if pixel == end:
            return path

        for adjacent in getadjacent(pixel):
            x,y = adjacent
            if iswhite(pixels[x,y]):
                pixels[x,y] = (127,127,127) # see note
                new_path = list(path)
                new_path.append(adjacent)
                queue.put(new_path)

    print "Queue has been exhausted. No answer was found."


if __name__ == '__main__':

    # invoke: python mazesolver.py <mazefile> <outputfile>[.jpg|.png|etc.]
    base_img = Image.open(sys.argv[1])
    base_pixels = base_img.load()

    path = BFS(start, end, base_pixels)

    path_img = Image.open(sys.argv[1])
    path_pixels = path_img.load()

    for position in path:
        x,y = position
        path_pixels[x,y] = (255,0,0) # red

    path_img.save(sys.argv[2])

Note: Marks a white visited pixel grey. This removes the need for a visited list, but this requires a second load of the image file from disk before drawing a path (if you don't want a composite image of the final path and ALL paths taken).

A blank version of the maze I used.

Here is a solution.

1. Convert image to grayscale (not yet binary), adjusting weights for the colors so that final grayscale image is approximately uniform. You can do it simply by controlling sliders in Photoshop in Image -> Adjustments -> Black & White.
2. Convert image to binary by setting appropriate threshold in Photoshop in Image -> Adjustments -> Threshold.
3. Make sure threshold is selected right. Use the Magic Wand Tool with 0 tolerance, point sample, contiguous, no anti-aliasing. Check that edges at which selection breaks are not false edges introduced by wrong threshold. In fact, all interior points of this maze are accessible from the start.
4. Add artificial borders on the maze to make sure virtual traveler will not walk around it :)
5. Implement breadth-first search (BFS) in your favorite language and run it from the start. I prefer MATLAB for this task. As @Thomas already mentioned, there is no need to mess with regular representation of graphs. You can work with binarized image directly.

Here is the MATLAB code for BFS:

function path = solve_maze(img_file)
  %% Init data
  img = imread(img_file);
  img = rgb2gray(img);
  maze = img > 0;
  start = [985 398];
  finish = [26 399];

  %% Init BFS
  n = numel(maze);
  Q = zeros(n, 2);
  M = zeros([size(maze) 2]);
  front = 0;
  back = 1;

  function push(p, d)
    q = p + d;
    if maze(q(1), q(2)) && M(q(1), q(2), 1) == 0
      front = front + 1;
      Q(front, :) = q;
      M(q(1), q(2), :) = reshape(p, [1 1 2]);
    end
  end

  push(start, [0 0]);

  d = [0 1; 0 -1; 1 0; -1 0];

  %% Run BFS
  while back <= front
    p = Q(back, :);
    back = back + 1;
    for i = 1:4
      push(p, d(i, :));
    end
  end

  %% Extracting path
  path = finish;
  while true
    q = path(end, :);
    p = reshape(M(q(1), q(2), :), 1, 2);
    path(end + 1, :) = p;
    if isequal(p, start) 
      break;
    end
  end
end

It is really very simple and standard, there should not be difficulties on implementing this in Python or whatever.

And here is the answer:

I tried myself implementing A-Star search for this problem. Followed closely the implementation by Joseph Kern for the framework and the algorithm pseudocode given here:

def AStar(start, goal, neighbor_nodes, distance, cost_estimate):
    def reconstruct_path(came_from, current_node):
        path = []
        while current_node is not None:
            path.append(current_node)
            current_node = came_from[current_node]
        return list(reversed(path))

    g_score = {start: 0}
    f_score = {start: g_score[start] + cost_estimate(start, goal)}
    openset = {start}
    closedset = set()
    came_from = {start: None}

    while openset:
        current = min(openset, key=lambda x: f_score[x])
        if current == goal:
            return reconstruct_path(came_from, goal)
        openset.remove(current)
        closedset.add(current)
        for neighbor in neighbor_nodes(current):
            if neighbor in closedset:
                continue
            if neighbor not in openset:
                openset.add(neighbor)
            tentative_g_score = g_score[current] + distance(current, neighbor)
            if tentative_g_score >= g_score.get(neighbor, float('inf')):
                continue
            came_from[neighbor] = current
            g_score[neighbor] = tentative_g_score
            f_score[neighbor] = tentative_g_score + cost_estimate(neighbor, goal)
    return []

As A-Star is a heuristic search algorithm you need to come up with a function that estimates the remaining cost (here: distance) until the goal is reached. Unless you're comfortable with a suboptimal solution it should not overestimate the cost. A conservative choice would here be the manhattan (or taxicab) distance as this represents the straight-line distance between two points on the grid for the used Von Neumann neighborhood. (Which, in this case, wouldn't ever overestimate the cost.)

This would however significantly underestimate the actual cost for the given maze at hand. Therefore I've added two other distance metrics squared euclidean distance and the manhattan distance multiplied by four for comparison. These however might overestimate the actual cost, and might therefore yield suboptimal results.

Here's the code:

import sys
from PIL import Image

def is_blocked(p):
    x,y = p
    pixel = path_pixels[x,y]
    if any(c < 225 for c in pixel):
        return True
def von_neumann_neighbors(p):
    x, y = p
    neighbors = [(x-1, y), (x, y-1), (x+1, y), (x, y+1)]
    return [p for p in neighbors if not is_blocked(p)]
def manhattan(p1, p2):
    return abs(p1[0]-p2[0]) + abs(p1[1]-p2[1])
def squared_euclidean(p1, p2):
    return (p1[0]-p2[0])**2 + (p1[1]-p2[1])**2

start = (400, 984)
goal = (398, 25)

# invoke: python mazesolver.py <mazefile> <outputfile>[.jpg|.png|etc.]

path_img = Image.open(sys.argv[1])
path_pixels = path_img.load()

distance = manhattan
heuristic = manhattan

path = AStar(start, goal, von_neumann_neighbors, distance, heuristic)

for position in path:
    x,y = position
    path_pixels[x,y] = (255,0,0) # red

path_img.save(sys.argv[2])

Here are some images for a visualization of the results (inspired by the one posted by Joseph Kern). The animations show a new frame each after 10000 iterations of the main while-loop.

Breadth-First Search:

A-Star Manhattan Distance:

A-Star Squared Euclidean Distance:

A-Star Manhattan Distance multiplied by four:

The results show that the explored regions of the maze differ considerably for the heuristics being used. As such, squared euclidean distance even produces a different (suboptimal) path as the other metrics.

Concerning the performance of the A-Star algorithm in terms of the runtime until termination, note that a lot of evaluation of distance and cost functions add up compared to the Breadth-First Search (BFS) which only needs to evaluate the "goaliness" of each candidate position. Whether or not the cost for these additional function evaluations (A-Star) outweighs the cost for the larger number of nodes to check (BFS) and especially whether or not performance is an issue for your application at all, is a matter of individual perception and can of course not be generally answered.

A thing that can be said in general about whether or not an informed search algorithm (such as A-Star) could be the better choice compared to an exhaustive search (e.g., BFS) is the following. With the number of dimensions of the maze, i.e., the branching factor of the search tree, the disadvantage of an exhaustive search (to search exhaustively) grows exponentially. With growing complexity it becomes less and less feasible to do so and at some point you are pretty much happy with any result path, be it (approximately) optimal or not.

Tree search is too much. The maze is inherently separable along the solution path(s).

(Thanks to rainman002 from Reddit for pointing this out to me.)

Because of this, you can quickly use connected components to identify the connected sections of maze wall. This iterates over the pixels twice.

If you want to turn that into a nice diagram of the solution path(s), you can then use binary operations with structuring elements to fill in the "dead end" pathways for each connected region.

Demo code for MATLAB follows. It could use tweaking to clean up the result better, make it more generalizable, and make it run faster. (Sometime when it's not 2:30 AM.)

% read in and invert the image
im = 255 - imread('maze.jpg');

% sharpen it to address small fuzzy channels
% threshold to binary 15%
% run connected components
result = bwlabel(im2bw(imfilter(im,fspecial('unsharp')),0.15));

% purge small components (e.g. letters)
for i = 1:max(reshape(result,1,1002*800))
    [count,~] = size(find(result==i));
    if count < 500
        result(result==i) = 0;
    end
end

% close dead-end channels
closed = zeros(1002,800);
for i = 1:max(reshape(result,1,1002*800))
    k = zeros(1002,800);
    k(result==i) = 1; k = imclose(k,strel('square',8));
    closed(k==1) = i;
end

% do output
out = 255 - im;
for x = 1:1002
    for y = 1:800
        if closed(x,y) == 0
            out(x,y,:) = 0;
        end
    end
end
imshow(out);