Aneek’s Status Update for 4/4 – A0

This week I was focused on getting finger detection in OpenCV working. The issue of various phantom ‘fingers’ being detected in the background was mitigated by using a plain, consistent background for the images (I tested on a white table and a black blanket). While that demonstrated that the approach I was using was working, the background will not be so consistent when puzzle pieces are laid out on the surface below the hand, so my next steps were to test out various methods of improving the detection on more complex backgrounds. The approach that seems the most promising is using a color mask to isolate the hand before running the edge detection to determine the fingertip. However, the color of the hands surface is drastically different depending on skin tone and lighting conditions, so my next steps to improve this are to continue research on alternative methods and/or ways to broaden the color mask to function across a broad spectrum of hands.