Checking for overlapping images with a hole in an image

Question

I have two image views. They are "puzzle pieces" I want to test if one fits inside the other. Not that the frames overlap. I guess its a CGRect thing... but seems like they test the outer boundaries. Any ideas would be appreciated? Thanks.

Answer 1

Do you know the correct order of pieces beforehand? May be it's better assign the tag to each UIImageView which will represent the image's index number. Then you just create a kind of mesh and check in which cell the piece was placed. If the cell number and UIImageView tag match - then this is the right place.

If you have only two images and one must fit to the specific area in another, you could store the frame of this hole and check if the piece is placed somewhere around the centre of this frame. It'll be more user-friendly because when you're checking pixels or bit masks you want the user be extremely precise. Or your comparison code should allow some shifts and will be very complicated.

But if you don't want to hardcode the hole frame you could calculate it dynamically (just find transparent areas in the image). Anyway, this solution will be more effective then checking bit match on the fly.

Answer 2

Just brainstorming here... Maybe this will get you thinking of something that will work for you. If the images do not overlap, then drawing image A on top of image B will result in the same image as drawing image B on top of image A. If they overlap, that will result in different images. You could do something like draw image A, then B. Create a checksum of the result, draw A again, and checksum that. If the checksums match, the puzzle piece fits.

If you have a 1-bit mask that represents each image, then ORing them together and XORing them together will have the same result if they don't overlap and different results if they do.