Over the past week, I have worked largely on the project presentation, transferring information from the previous slides to the final project presentation and adding new information. While our final presentation has a significant amount of information that was covered in our proposal presentation (the application area and solution approach) and the design review (hardware and solution description), our final presentation has the results of our preliminary testing and significant discussion of design trade studies. For example, LED strips on the side of our live studio give significantly more even lighting than point lighting.
This week, I also assisted with integration and assembly of our project. I cut out different felt squares and strips for the backdrop of our live studio and assisted with assembly. We tried out black, bright green, dark green, and dark blue felt backdrops. The different colored backdrops had different results on the background removal algorithm due to how uniformly lit they could be, and the brightness of the backdrops affected the cameras’ autoexposure settings, affecting how the object was shown. Unfortunately, brighter backgrounds were less uniformly lit, but darker backgrounds badly influenced the cameras’ autoexposure settings, causing the object to be whited out with very few details shown. We settled on dark green felt to serve as a backdrop, and we also blocked the bottom LED strip lights to better improve the even lighting of our studio. I also assisted Breyden with the adjustment process of background removal and visual quality of our product.
I am track with our schedule, as I have both worked on the final presentation and helped out with integration and preliminary testing. Tomorrow, I will listen to Breyden’s practice run of the final presentation to give feedback, and I will also assist with acquiring footage of our project to be used for the final presentation. Over the next week, depending on time constraints, I will also have the additional task of assisting with finishing tests, adjusting our project, and making the final video.