This week, in our weekly team meeting with Professor Savvides and our TA, Uzair, we worked on reasoning about the feasibility of our project and what we could modify about our proposed MVP to make it better suit our needs. We realized that since bananas rot quite quickly, using a banana in the MVP would be a good idea. We also discussed ways in which we could get pictures of the fruits from all angles. Another idea that was brought up was that we could predict the rottenness of the fruit, or how long it was expected to last, and this sounded like quite an interesting idea for our final project!
Initially, we were considering only round fruits in order to be able to cover all of the sides with ease using a rotating disk. However, when we started considering bananas, we shifted our focus to find ways in which we can hold the fruit up and click pictures from all angles to check for rotting. I spent some time this week thinking about the design of our model. We could have a holder that could hold our fruits up, and then we could have a camera on a rotating stand that could click pictures of the fruit from all angles.
However, this would imply we need quite a heavy-weight stand to hoist the camera on since rotating the stand would not be easy. Thus, an alternative is that we could have the holder rotate the fruit. For this, I looked into rotating disks. To the rotating disk, we could attach a hook to hold the banana (or any other fruit), and then, as the fruit would rotate, the camera would capture pictures. When I looked up rotating disks online, I usually found ones that looked like the one below:
Such a rotating disk would’ve suited our earlier model with round fruits, but it doesn’t work for our current model. We would want rotating disks that could have a hook attached to them using which we could hang the fruit. Thus, I thought we would probably need to 3D print the rotating disk so that we can attach a hook to it, or design it such that it already has a hook built into it, from which we can hang the fruit.
We seem to be on schedule for now. Over the next week, first off, I plan on updating our project proposal presentation in order to ensure we are putting across our idea clearly. Post that, I plan on looking into image segmentation and edge/color detection algorithms so that I understand them better since we would need these algorithms not only to identify the fruit but also to be able to predict rottenness.