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).
This week I spent a significant amount of time trying to optimize our Fisherfaces implementation to achieve higher accuracy. Currently, we are at around 50-60% accuracy. Some things I tried include the following:
Randomly alter the contrast and brightness for all training images. This was an attempt to prevent poorly collected training data from causing the training to overfit on the training data and give poor results in actual testing. More specifically, if we had training data taken in only one or two light settings then testing in another light setting may lead to poor results. The Fisherfaces (eigenvectors) may really just be capturing the brightness features. Indeed, we often see the first few eigenvalues having very large values which might be because of their capturing pixel brightness.
We also tried to collect better training data. We focused on two aspects. One we collected data at a higher resolution (140 x 140) pixels while before we were just using 64 x 64. Using even higher resolution is expensive because of the large matrix multiplications involved which are a function of the image input dimension. We also collected data where the lighting in the room was varied across several settings.
I tried running the algorithm on more people. Usually, we tested only 3 people but I tried as many as 5 or 6 now.
I began researching how to extract the skin HSV thresholding given a bounding box of a persons face so that we could then detect the skin of that same person’s hand (therefore able to detect a hand-raise).
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
On schedule.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Next week is Spring Break. If I find free time I may volunteer to do some work but I may also end up doing nothing, which our schedule (gant-chart) allows for us to do.
