This week, we started going deeper into the machine learning aspect of things. After some experimentation with OpenPose on the Nano, it became abundantly clear that if we want to meet our speed requirements we definitely should not run it locally. It’s good to know this early on – now we know that AWS EC2 is definitely the only way forward if we want to keep our current design of utilizing both OpenPose and OpenCV.
We also found out that OpenPose doesn’t recognize the back of hands, especially gestures where the fingers are not visible (like a closed fist with the back of the hand facing the camera). We are going to re-map some of our gestures so that we know that each gesture is, at minimum, recognized by OpenPose. This would greatly reduce the risk of a gesture that is never recognized later on, or the need for additional machine learning algorithms incorporated into the existing infrastructure.
(OpenPose can detect the hand backwards, but cannot do the same with a fist backwards)
We are quickly realizing the limitations of the Nano and seriously reconsidering changing to the Xavier. We are in contact with our advisor about this situation, and he is ready to order an Xavier for us if need be. Within the next two weeks, we can probably make a firmer decision on how to proceed. So far, only the CPU has shown serious limitations (overheating while running basic install commands, running OpenPose, etc.). Once OpenCV is installed and running, we can make a more accurate judgement.