Sarah’s Status Report for 3/6

This week, my team members and I researched and designed the components of the projects individually assigned to us. In particular, I looked into several tutorials and found built in functions in the OpenCV module that would help with differentiating the plant from the rest of the video for CV analysis to be done. In speciic, I looked into the pixel per metric technique to figure out the real life size of objects through the camera, HSV color detection and edge detection to detect withering, disease, bending, and flowers/ fruits. Using a pea shoot image I found online, I found certain color hue, saturation, and value that would separate the bundle of pea shoots from the rest of the objects in the captured image such as the soil, the background, and the planting tray. Afterwards, I implemented some edge detection to get a clear outline of the shapes of the stems and leaves. My teammates and I also ordered our materials on Monday, and I have received all the hardware I need such as the RPi, RPi power adapter, RF transmitters and receivers, and planting material.

My progress is on schedule, as my team just needs to make some final adjustments on the design review presentations after receiving feedback, and we are all started on the implementation process of each of our tasks. I learned a lot more about OpenCV this week and have a much clearer idea of how I can use the built in functions to cater to image and video analysis of plants.

By next week, I hope to connect my camera to my RPi, and work with the RPi camera for my CV application. I would like to figure out the HSV parameters out of the images that the camera provides and I will most likely use some plants I have at home to figure out the basics to HSV Color and Edge detection specific the camera and lighting at my place. I would like to accomplish the pixel by metric technique and the flower distinguishing algorithm by the end of next week.

Sarah’s Status Report 2/27

While the presentations were going on and Hiroko presented, my teammates and I decided to study our individual parts of the project. I downloaded OpenCV on my computer and tested some of its functionality . I also looked into the best cameras and boards to maintain a 24/7 live stream. With the OpenCV, I looked into edge detection, how the module recognizes and categorizes certain objects, and how to separate colors, as all these aspects will be key to the defect and growth stage detection. I also tried to figure out how OpenCV categorizes shapes and the size of objects.

The team as a whole is on task, and we will be meeting next Monday to gather what we’ve been working on, and the equipment and materials we need to order. On my part, I would’ve liked to learn more this week about applying CV on plants in specific and get a rough idea of how I will measure some components such as how to figure out the degree of bending of a stem, but hopefully more tutorials will help me understand my part of the project.

I am hoping that we know what to buy and let Abha or other TAs know by Monday and Wednesday the latest. I am also hoping that we can rent some boards like a Raspberry Pi, as that would help our budget. On my part, I am hoping to look into more tutorials and edge detection/ color classification of OpenCV throughout the weekend.

Sarah’s Status Report for 2/20

This week, I went into deeper research on what environmental factors we need to consider for the growth of plants in a greenhouse. I specifically researched pea shoots. We took into consideration the feedback we got from our abstract and divided up work from the feedback, specifically I addressed the RealSense camera being too expensive and possibly not necessary for the scope of the project, clarification about whether we would be training ML models or implementing a CV application, and choosing plants that would be best for testing in the time frame we have. After thorough research, I found the pea shoot to work best for our project as it is ready to harvest as soon as 3 weeks, and if the pea shoot is successful we can look into including more quickly growing plants for our tests. We decided to go in the CV application direction by detecting growth stages and defects of plants based on plant color, size, and shape. We decided with using cheaper but still high quality cameras like the RPi IR-Cut Camera V2, which also has night vision. Below is a link of the progress we made this week to build our presentation, with each member’s research underneath their name.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Kj2HFveDk5Tp5_XJ2rWFR_U-8fiJ47mEStU7owtN7NU/edit?usp=sharing

After researching further from Monday, on Wednesday we began creating the proposal presentation. I worked on clarifying the use case in our introduction, the computer vision and live stream monitoring requirements points, the testing process, quantitative results we expect when working with pea shoots, technical challenges we may find in the computer vision application, and the tasks on my part. We met on Friday to check in with each other’s progress and to clear up any confusion about the proposal.

Currently, we are on schedule as our team just finished our proposal presentation slides and submitted it to Abha for critique. We are hoping Abha will get back to us about it tomorrow and before submitting the slides the group can meet one more time to practice the pitch.

Next week, we hope to start on the design documentation and receive more feedback from other TAs and professors. I also plan on getting familiar with OpenCV by messing around with the library on my computer locally, and researching more on cameras and boards that would suit the requirements of the CV application.