I spent most of my time this week working on the design report and presentation. After looking through some reports from previous semesters, I created a rough outline in which the team and divide and flesh out each of our respective focus areas. I researched some previous projects using Tesseract, an open source OCR (optical character recognition) program. Although this program is widely support and has seen pretty good success with reading text from signs and paper, I am a little worried about the performance for reading room labels variable conditions. To potentially boost the accuracy of Tesseract’s OCR, I am planning to add in heuristics on frame rate, image resolution, and image processing techniques like binarizing.

I also spent some time with Aditi and Alex to reflect on the presentation feedback. Although our project scope and idea seemed clear to us, that did not seem to translate as smoothly into the presentation. For the next presentation, we plan to reiterate this point on project scope again.

I would say that our progress is on schedule.Drawing the block diagram and seeing how all the connections can fit together helped to give me peace of mind that our idea will work. However, I do think that the amount of commitment and hours spend will drastically increase in the coming week in order for us to keep on schedule.

In the next week, we will complete the design presentation and submit the proposal, as well as start tinkering with the parts. I plan to be working with the Pi Camera and Tesseract to test an initial OCR algorithm.