This week, I worked on locating our hot pot strainers using thresholding and ellipse detection. After meeting in person last weekend and getting to see our physical parts in place, we decided that the control tower should be free to move with relation to the hot pot instead of being in a preset place. Firstly, when users tap on the touch screen at the base of the control tower they may cause some movement in the camera at the top. Secondly, we want the user to have the freedom to set up their ingredient platters wherever they want in order to maintain the spirit of un-augmented hot pot and we felt this freedom should carry over to the control tower as well, as long as the camera can still see the strainers from above. This necessitates a tracking algorithm that can see where the hot pot and strainers are throughout a video feed, so that we can still tell which strainer an ingredient is being dropped into even if the camera’s perspective has shifted. Below is a frame of the results on a test video of just the hot pot and the strainers with a fairly wide range of movement. When one of the strainer lip outlines is obstructed (leftmost strainer), it is not detected. Using the blue outline of the pot and the location of the other strainers (green), we should be able to determine the location of the missing strainer since our hot pot/strainer setup will stay consistent within itself. However, if it becomes a problem we can make sure that the camera is in an appropriate place during setup by giving the user instructions on the UI.
