PoolTracker DDR

This week, the main thing that I worked on was setting up the entire tracking pipeline. This entails not just the tracking algorithm, but also the transfer of data between the backend system and the web application front end. To that end, I set up the infrastructure that would allow our backend to send information as a POST request to the front end. Furthermore, I worked on fine-tuning the tracking algorithm so that it can handle slightly tilted camera angles, more work needs to be done on this front.

For the next week (after spring break), I want to get tracking working. This would mean that I aim to have the backend track a swimmer over the course of multiple laps and send data periodically (when a lap is completed) to the front end. It follows that, we need to get some sort of collision detection with the lane edges working.

Another significant time commitment for this week was writing the mid-term report for our project.

This week my effort was split in two main areas. Firstly, I worked towards furthering my tracking and detection algorithms. In particular, I worked towards denoising the image since the noice caused by all the splashing by the swimmers was causing our tracker to not track effectively. There are some further enhancements we need to make but this was definitely a step in the right direction.

Secondly, I worked with Jack to further improve the web app by giving it the ability to handle POST requests from clients. This functionality is imperative for our project since the tracker will be sending information to the web app periodically so that it can be displayed back to clients.

Additionally, 4+ hours this week were spent watching other groups’ progress in their projects. This was also useful since we could adapt the professors’ feedback for other groups to ours.

My progress is on track for the week. For the next week, I plan to continue working on both the tracking algorithm and the web app. In particular, I want to have swimmer tracking working before spring break. However, keeping in mind that I have to complete the design report and also the ethics assignment, both of which I expect will detract from the time I have to work on the actual project, I might have to use up some of the “slack” time that I had built into my schedule in the upcoming weeks.

For this week, one of the big changes that we made was to switch from using OpenPose to OpenCV. With that in mind, I decided to take upon the challenge of testing OpenCV for our particular context. Attached is a result that I had for a stock footage from the 2016 olympic games.

Secondly, as is documented in our team’s weekly status report for this week, we decided to move around some things in our schedule and as a result, we deployed a basic web application that will serve as a base to our project. I worked on deploying this web app onto an AWS instance along with Jack.

Lastly, another milestone for this week is to create the presentation for the design reviews of next week. I contributed to this along with both my group mates.

For the next week, my personal milestones are to debug my tracking algorithm and implement a detection algorithm. The aim is to have detection and tracking working by the time I write this report next week.