How to identify a moving GIF or something similar?

Help
1

Hello all,

I wanna know if it’s possible to identify a small moving GIF (it may be a small series of pictures, I’m not sure) sitting on a website?

Image recognition is off the table since the picture keeps changing. Any ideas on how to teach the robot to look for it?

Thanks

2

@atoth3,

As per my understanding there is no direct way to achieve this but the idea is interesting.
I will try to work on it and get back to you.

Regards,
@hacky

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3

A first approach, with little to no external resources could be:

  • Take screenshot
  • Compute hash of said screenshot
  • Wait some time (a few ms)
  • Take another screenshot
  • Compute hash again and compare to the previous one. If they differ, there is at least some kind of change or animation in the screen.

This isn’t 100% reliable, but it doesn’t require much effort.

Another possible approach, if you specifically want a gif, could be to download the entire page and see in the page itself (the html) if there’s any references to “.gif”

I wouldn’t recommend this option either, since the animation might just be some fancy CSS tricks

If you want to have a more reliable way of telling if there’s some kind of video, you need more advanced computer vision techniques (not necessarily machine learning based) that I wouldn’t even try to code directly in UIPath.

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