This week I continued learning about and working on algorithms and techniques for detecting people using IR imaging data, as well as looked into which specific hardware components (cameras and controllers) would be best suited for our project. Significant time this week has also gone into the design review presentation and slides.
Because we have made a pivot in the project (based on the fact that our original idea of using a drone to search an area for people would not have been able to cover a wide enough area to make for an effective product) we have pivoted to a different project idea, but one that will still be making use of detecting people using IR imaging, so this component of the project will still be useful and is not one that we are behind schedule in. In the next week I hope to have finally placed an order for an IR camera based on what I have found out about them this week, and test if simpler algorithms (such as edge detecting, or thresholding) will be sufficient to detect people (and not detect not-people) for our use case, or if more advanced methods (CNNs, for instance) will be needed.