This week, I was able to work on a basic feed selection algorithm which switched to a new camera feed every time it saw consecutively increasing bounding box sizes for 3 frames. I have asked Bhavya to test it with his object detection code with his webcam and using his hand to move the car and I have also prepared it to be tested on a looping video with 2 perspectives of the car (from the bottom left corner and the bottom side) tomorrow. The number of frames that need to be seen consecutively increasing in size can be varied to experiment with what would make for the best switching. More advanced algorithms are still in the idea phase, one of which involves switching when the front of the car is identified in one of the frames using a custom trained cascade classifier. This is working towards the design document proposed approach which combines both of these metrics for switching. I have also tried out an idea that acts as a risk mitigation plan for the car’s speed as it races around the track, which is taping quarters to the car to slow it down. I was able to get 5 quarters on the car which did slow it down noticeably, taking at least a few more seconds to finish 10 laps around a small track. The drawback of this strategy is that it is a bit more likely for the car to run off the track during tight turns at high speeds, so that will be one challenge we will have to account for in our track design and crash system requirements if we end up needing this risk mitigation strategy for our project. We will also have to adjust our object detection algorithms if we use tape since the car looks different especially if we are custom training them.
My progress is behind schedule by a little bit since I’m interfacing with Bhavya’s CV code for the first time tomorrow, so hopefully that goes well. To stay on track I’ll need to have our code integrated fully tomorrow and then as it gets updated use Git source control to keep our code integrated as we both continue working on our sides. I’ll need to get the best performance out of the bounding box size algorithm by Monday ideally and the cascade classifier-based algorithm trained and tested a bit by Wednesday. By next Saturday I’ll need to have integrated these into as solid of an algorithm that I can get for the interim demo.