Brandon Hung’s Status Report

This week was quite busy for me, but I still tried to make as much time as possible to work on a new approach to the CV. My first attempt of CV was tuning a color segmentation algorithm. However, this simple was not working because variations in lighting are devastating to color segmentation algorithms. If we continued using the same approach, I do not think it would be possible to meet the requirements. After thinking about the problem, I’ve come up with a preliminary solution idea I’ve spent most of the day implementing. The idea is to use the white checkers on the chips as a marker. I plan on aggregating the white markings to group them together. This is done by searching the surrounding image area for more chips. Then, draw a rectangle around the grouped markings to get a bounding box. This allows me to use the least squares approximation to fit a line between the bases of the rectangles; once that is done, I will be able to rotate the image so the stacks are roughly horizontally matched. From that point, I can rotate the rectangles to get the true height of the stacks. This algorithm is a lot more involved than the previous one, so I am working on getting it right. I have several bugs with aggregation, which I hope to solve before tomorrow.