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.