Take a selfie, wait for the image to appear, and behold a cartoon version of yourself. Or, at least, behold a cartoon version of whatever the camera thought it saw. Welcome to Draw This by maker Dan Macnish.

Dan has made code, instructions, and wiring diagrams available to help you bring this beguiling weirdery into your own life.

Neural networks, object recognition, and cartoons

One of the fun things about this re-imagined polaroid is that you never get to see the original image. You point, and shoot – and out pops a cartoon; the camera’s best interpretation of what it saw. The result is always a surprise. A food selfie of a healthy salad might turn into an enormous hot dog, or a photo with friends might be photobombed by a goat.

OK. Let’s take this one step at a time.

Pi + camera + button + LED

Draw This uses a Raspberry Pi 3 and a Camera Module, with a button and a useful status LED connected to the GPIO pins via a breadboard. You press the button, and the camera captures a still image while the LED comes on and stays lit for a couple of seconds while the Pi processes the image. So far, so standard Pi camera build.

Interpreting and re-interpreting the camera image

Dan uses Python to process the captured photograph, employing a pre-trained machine learning model from Google to recognise multiple objects in the image. Now he brings the strangeness. The Pi matches the things it sees in the photo with doodles from Google’s huge open-source Quick, Draw! dataset, and generates a new image that represents the objects in the original image as doodles. Then a thermal printer connected to the Pi’s GPIO pins prints the results.

Kangaroos from the Quick, Draw! dataset (I got distracted)

Potential for peculiar

Reading about this build leaves me yearning to see its oddest interpretation of a scene, so if you make this and you find it really does turn you or your friend into a goat, please do share that with us.

And as you can see from my kangaroo digression above, there is a ton of potential for bizarro makes that use the Quick, Draw! dataset, object recognition models, or both; it’s not just the marsupials that are inexplicably compelling (I dare you to go and look and see how long it takes you to get back to whatever you were in the middle of). If you’re planning to make this, or something inspired by this, check out Dan’s cartoonify GitHub repo. And tell us all about it in the comments.