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A comment on I found two identical packs of Skittles among 468 packs. Parent comment

Re:I found two identical packs of Skittles among 468 packs by daveFNbuck on Thursday April 18, 2019 @02:36AM (#19689174)
If you have to put the bag in the machine, it's not much more effort to tear it open. If you do that over a large funnel, that should work to get all the skittles into the counter most of the time.

I was thinking that time could be saved by not sorting the skittles so nicely. Just take a picture of the skittles from each bag spread out randomly. You should be able to figure out the color distribution just by counting pixels within each color range.

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Re:I found two identical packs of Skittles among 468 packs by dotancohen on Thursday April 18, 2019 @07:23AM (#19690180)
You do not even need to count the pixels. OpenCV will identify the objects, then their dominant colour can be determined.
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Re:I found two identical packs of Skittles among 468 packs by dekhn on Thursday April 18, 2019 @08:44AM (#19690545)
actually ripping a small bag filled with stuff open reliably is a bit harder than you might think.
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Re:I found two identical packs of Skittles among 468 packs by fencepost on Thursday April 18, 2019 @10:45AM (#19691374)
actually ripping a small bag filled with stuff open reliably is a bit harder than you might think.

"That's why we built Loppy the Chopper over there."

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Re:I found two identical packs of Skittles among 468 packs by daveFNbuck on Friday April 19, 2019 @12:24PM (#19700797)
That's why I was saying I wouldn't try to automate that part. You don't need a super-reliable method if you're doing it by hand. On average, it probably takes a lot longer to count the skittles by hand than it does to open the bag, so most of the savings comes from the part that's easy to do reliably.
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