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Kevin’s Status Report for 09/24/2022

This week, my team and I worked on preparing and presenting the slide deck for our proposal presentation. To prepare for the presentation, I made sure to spend some time rehearsing and editing the final slide deck to fit the expected pace. Following the presentation, we received some insightful feedback on the directions our project could take as we move into the next phase.

Since I have been assigned to focus on character classification and testing, I spent the remaining time this week looking for open source datasets as well as printed artifacts we could use for testing, and researching algorithms we could use to featurize the segmented braille characters. For the former, I’ve found custom shops on Etsy which specialize in braille printing or sell braille goods, as well as dedicated online storefronts for braille goods. However, popular storefronts, such as Amazon, seem to have a limited selection. For the latter, Jay suggested that we look into Hough Transforms, a technique which may be useful for extracting the position of shapes in an image. I also found a GitHub repository with a pre-trained classifier that may be a good place to start, which I am planning to test in the next week.

Everything has been on schedule during these first few weeks. During the past week, we have completed the joint deliverables for website bring-up and the proposal presentation. Personally, I have started research into a more robust testing criteria and featurization strategies. Looking ahead, next week, I expect to work with the team to develop a final technical design to present on the following Monday, in addition to experimenting with software options on my own. By the end of the week, we should also have an initial parts list for anything we may need to order in addition to the existing hardware we’ve requested from inventory.

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Chester’s Status Report for 9/24/2022

We are currently working on the final design of our product as software and for the application’s wearability. This week was focused primarily on the proposal presentation slides and analysis of feedback, and then researching separately for the development. 

In our schedule, the main bulk of our project comes after the design presentation because we want to have a finalized structure before delving deeply into the work. This includes software design trade-offs as well as structuring the project to allow for parallelism and growth. Therefore, since the development begins primarily after the design review, we are very much on time, and have good space for the beginning of our project. 

The coming week will involve hands-on hardware integration, as well as the development of the software + hardware design for finalization. Working with the hardware will allow us to find more challenges and difficulties to iron out before integrating a final product design. Alongside this, we will be concluding research in our separate fields in order to begin the software and hardware development.

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Jong Woo’s Status Report for 09/24/2022

 

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

I started research on image pre-processing and segmentation using OpenCV libraries. In order to convert an image or a photo taken from a camera into a binarized image that could then be segmented and recognized, various pre-processing steps needs to be taken. For example, given an imported image of a braille document,

  

various OpenCV functions that would i) convert the image into gray scales, ii) reduce the overall noise of an image, iii) enhance the edge contrast, iv) then binarize the current image using similar approach as below, giving images like .

Further on, by i) finding the connected components and extracting the mean height and width using cv’s cv2.connectedComponentWithStats function and np.mean() function. ii) Find empty rows, defined as having less than mean_h/2 pixels. iii) Group and assign each labels to rows, and then find the mean row value associated with each label.After successive steps, the image will then be segmented like this:

Next steps from here is to adopt Hough transform to identify and recognize each of the segmented braille alphabets. And the work will follow in the following week. 

  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

Things that were due this week were i) research on image pre-processing and segmentation and ii) initiation on the hardware design. Everything planned is completed on track and as scheduled.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

By the end of next week I plan on accomplishing the following: 1) collaborative initial hardware design, in a form of camera mounted glasses in combination with a wearable vest that would hold the jetson xavier. 2) Tradeoffs for various image pre-processing and segmentation methods and start testing out the effectivenesses of each preprocessing algorithms to decide whether the code needs to be written from scratch to match our metrics requirements for recognition and translation. 3) Initiate camera integration 

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Team Status Report for 09/24/2022

1. What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project?

At this point in our project, most of our significant risks involve the general success of the software we provide. Alongside this, relying on the processing capabilities of the hardware to reinforce our quantitative requirements and optimizing for proper performance. Also, if we are unable to find any significant research in braille CV detection, it will require a more bottom-up development that could require more time and research rather than optimizing.

2. How are these risks being managed? 

By staying ahead of schedule in development, we can ensure we have plenty of time to do both unit testing and integration testing to give us a baseline for what needs to be worked on and optimized. We can continuously develop software in parallel so that it is easier to sidestep or add to the process if needed. 

3. What contingency plans are ready? 

Working steps have been modularized and parallelized to facilitate team cooperation and collaboration.

4. Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)?

While we are actively workshopping our design, some of the major considerations we made in the past weeks apply to narrowing the scope of our project and ironing out the details of our MVP. After speaking with Professor Yu, it became clear that we wanted to prioritize functionality and performance to meet our use-case requirements, with form factor and comfort as a secondary goal. Therefore, we decided to follow Alex’s advice to develop our MVP on the Jetson Xavier, which would provide ample headroom for optimization. However, due to its size and weight, the Jetson would not fit comfortably on a helmet or mounted to glasses, as we had originally envisioned. Therefore, we are likely to update our MVP to a wearable camera linked to the Jetson worn on a vest.

Following our Proposal Presentation, we received a lot of insightful feedback from our instructors and peers. Namely, there was some confusion about the technical details of our MVP and what our test environment would look like. As we move into the design stage of our development cycle, we will make sure to emphasize these features for our report and presentation. This is especially important so that our team has a clear idea of our goal by the end of the semester and so that we can order relevant materials ahead of time. There were also questions about how our solution addressed the problems we introduced in our use case. As we have narrowed our scope down to a more manageable size, we have also managed some tradeoffs in terms of functionality. However, we hope that our MVP will provide a strong foundation from which the path to an ideal solution will become clear.

5. Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward? 

Specifically, obtaining the actual Jetson Xavier board made us realize that it would be realistically impossible for the users to carry around all the parts on top of the helmet due to its heavy weight and bulky size. Therefore we will be adopting a combination of camera mounted glasses and a vest for our initial build design. Since we have been in the design phase so far and haven’t built the hardware yet, there will not be any costs that require further mitigations. 

6. Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred. 

We have not made any changes to our schedule as a result of the updates we made to our design this week. Looking ahead on our Gantt chart, next week will be dedicated to planning out the technical details of our project and preparing our Design Review presentation. This will likely involve experimenting with the hardware and software involved in developing our MVP.