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Team Status Report

The most significant risk as of now is identifying an efficient method to display the different components of the .svg file onto the whiteboard. We need to display the components in such a way that it is easy for a user to edit each component individually. Current methods and our backup plan involves taking each independent object and outputting each one as a separate .png file onto our whiteboard. We could also write our own parser to iterate through the objects of a .svg file and draw each component as it’s individual object. More research will need to be done to decide on a method.

The biggest change we may make is that we may implement the goal of straightening lines as a feature on our GUI such that the user can explicitly mark which lines they would like to be straight in order to reduce the complexity of the computer vision algorithm on the pre processing side. This will incur no additional costs.

We are a little behind however there have been no changes to our schedule since we are aiming to get back on track by the end of this week.

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Denise’s Status Report for 4/02/2022

This week I finished modifying the use-case requirements, abstract, and testing portions of the design report in preparation for our final report. I also integrated the computer vision component with the vectorization portion such that once the image is captured; it will be written as a .jpeg file to DrawBuddy/vectorization/inputs where it will then be fetched by a call to the VTracer API and vectorized as a .svg file in the DrawBuddy/vectorization/results folder.

I also began looking into ways we can display .svg files not as .pngs onto our whiteboard display since this was a problem we did not account for. We had assumed svgUtils had additional function for displaying .svg files but currently pyQt looks promising. The remaining work to integrate the rest of our project includes taking the .svg file and outputting it onto our virtual whiteboard.

In terms of identifying straight lines, I discussed with Lisa and  we’re thinking of pivoting to performing this on the post processing side such that the user can explicitly mark which lines they would like to straighten as opposed to trying to produce and algorithm that could estimate the user’s preferences.

I am a little behind schedule since setting up the whiteboard and displaying objects onto it were setbacks that we did not expect. However this is a minor setback and we should be able to get back on schedule within the next week or so.

Next week we hope to have a fully integrated system for vectorization. such that  a user can click our vectorize button and it will take whatever image the user has and output it onto the whiteboard. More work will need to be done to filter the noise from the image and send the images to connected peers.

I also hope to begin working on the translation and resizing features of objects within the image on our whiteboard.

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Denise’s Status Report for 3/26/2022

This week I continued updating the design report as per feedback. Specifically I edited the use case requirements section and specifications to help clarify the use case and user interaction of DrawBuddy. This week I also spent more time considering the ethical impacts of our project and discussed in with my group possible ways to make DrawBuddy more secure in order to prevent data leakage and unwanted users from disrupting a session.  We will add implementing a kick button to remove unwanted users as well as using encrypted communication as stretch goals.

 

I am a little behind, since in order to start on the next section with the modifying SVG images, I need to be able to work with the whiteboard interface which is currently in the process of being implemented by Ronald and Lisa.

Ideally next week I will be able to use the whiteboard and implement translations and scaling features.

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Lisa’s Status Report for March 26, 2022

On Monday, I went to the ethics discussion during class. Prior to the ethics discussion, I had completed the ethics paper and done the two required readings. During class, we thought of and discussed ethical issue with different teams’ projects.

We are on schedule so far. This week, I mostly worked on the GUI/frontend, particularly the whiteboard portion of it. An image of the what the whiteboard UI looks like right now is shown below.

On the left is the whiteboard, which will contain the vectorized imaged. On the right there is a title that says “Camera Feed” and 3 buttons: “Receive”, “Send”, and “Vectorize Image”. The user can click on the “send” button to send the contents of the vectorized image to another user. The “receive” button can be used to check for any received messages in the inbox. And the “vectorize image” button will be used by the user once they are ready to vectorize the image that they are holding up.

Next week, I want to be able to actually display the vectorized contents of the image on the whiteboard. Once Ronald implements being able to create and host a session through the GUI, we will then try to implement being able to send and receive messages. We will try to get started on a basic UI framework for the user’s inbox.

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Team Status Report for Mar 26, 2022

Currently the biggest risk that I see facing the project is an issue where I think that there’s a possibility of the client-side server code not being able to handle a user receiving a diagram from another user until they perform an action as they are stuck in a loop in the code and they can’t leave it until they perform said action. This isn’t a risk yet as the code for the server and the code for the GUI hasn’t been combined yet but currently the best solution that I can see for this is having it such that only one user can send and modify images and the other users can’t as anything else would require quite the large shift of the current plan.

We haven’t really spoken about the use of a back button in our design but after some initial frustration with the current GUI layout we are going to add one. The current method of testing requires us to run the code and go to the desired app page and if we want to go backwards we need to close out of the window and relaunch it.

There have been no changes for the schedule of the project this week as everything is going smoothly.

We have added some additional layouts to the GUI and can even display what the computer camera can see.

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Ronald’s Status Report for March 26, 2022

Personally this week I created two screens for the GUI for the application although I’ve been having some issues with centering the items on the page. One of the pages is for the person creating the room to go to where they get given a random entry number and the other is for the people not creating the room to go to where they must input a number.

Our progress is still on schedule I believe as we still have plenty of time to finish working on the frontend.

This week I will be attempting to integrate the application GUI code with the backend server code to create the option for multiple users to communicate with each other. I will also add a back button as moving through the pages can be annoying.

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Team Status Report for Mar 19, 2022

What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?

So far, a risk that we have discussed this week is the issue of our app not being able to recognize perfectly straight lines as lines, since people are generally not going to be able to draw completely perfect lines. We discussed the merits of a temporal approach, but decided against that because it would require the user to have a camera mounted over their drawing, and defeats the primary purpose of our project (since we’re trying to make the whole experience easier than having to make the diagram digitally). We then settled on a different solution, which is that the user can circle where the corners of the line are and the program would automatically draw a line between them. We also added a stretch goal of snapping a not completely straight vertical or horizontal line to be perfectly at 0º or 90º.

Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?

There are no updates to the schedule for our project. We did, however, add an additional design page for our GUI/frontend. This page will contain all of the received images of the user (up to a 100 images). Our example of what this would look like is below:

There will be an “Open Image” button, as shown in the last column, that the user can click on whenever they decide to open it. The image name is the name that was given by the sender. We also want to display the sender of the image so that the user can keep track of which image came from who, reducing the amount of external communication (the sender wouldn’t have to send a text to the user to notify that they were the one who sent the image). This also helps users keep track when multiple users are sending images to each other within one session. Currently, we’ve been working on our frontend/GUI and our code for vectorizing a diagram.

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Lisa’s Status Report for Mar 19, 2022

This week, I worked with Ronald on the GUI frontend for the project. Specifically, I read the PySimpleGUI documentation and created a very basic home page for the GUI. I’ve attached an image of what it looks like below.

Ronald and I then discussed how to split up the basic frontend of the GUI, and what we aimed to accomplish for the GUI by Monday. I’m in charge of also making the whiteboard interface for the GUI (including the send and review buttons on the whiteboard)

So far, our progress is on schedule. Next week, Ronald and I would like to get most of the functional aspects of the GUI done (we’ll focus on making it more user-friendly and aesthetic in the week after). Specifically, the main things we want to get done next week are developing the whiteboard interface for the GUI and ensuring that we can start a server session through the GUI.

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Denise’s Status Report for 3/19

During this past week  I was successfully able to turn transform .jpeg and .png files comprised of lines like the one depicted below in .svg files using VTracer via a Python script.

This week I also reviewed the design feedback and after meeting with professor Savvides, I discussed with my group about pivoting to adding marks to the physical diagrams to identify which lines should be straight within the diagram. Note that these marks should not be rendered in the final image. I have been reviewing our design report and making modifications to the use case requirements, abstract, and introduction based on the feedback. I also have been discussing with my team

In terms of the planned work, I am ahead of schedule however editing the design report was not something we accounted for but overall I am still on schedule.

Once my teammates set up a bare bone Web App GUI, I will work on importing the .svg files and adding translation/scaling features to the GUI. I will need to add more to the Python script to correctly parse the files to generated from Lisa’s CV portion and write it to a directory accessible for Ronald’s server code. In the meantime, I will continue updating the design report.

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Ronald’s Status Report for Mar 19, 2022

This week I spent working partly on the ethics assignment and partly reading the documentation for PyGUI and helping Lisa in the creation of a super basic frontend for the application. An image of what it currently looks like will be linked.

Our progress is currently still on schedule we have until the 9th of April to finish all of the GUI stuff and I believe that that should be enough time to get all of that done.

This week I hope to multiple working pages for the GUI instead of just the home page that doesn’t actually link to anything else.