Risk Identification and Mitigation Strategies
Primary Risk Concern: Our primary risk concern for this phase of the project is being able to identify the expiration date correctly given the input image taken by our camera. We have done optimization for our camera, therefore we are now moving on to the processing phase There are many concerns regarding the accuracy of the date, as even the slightest error could lead to a totally wrong information. Therefore, a lot of preprocessing and postprocessing is required to ensure optimal character recognition. For now, we will focus on preprocessing mechanisms, as we have not implemented the character recognition yet.
Mitigation Measures:
We are planning on implementing these preprocessing measures:
- Resizing image
- Contrast enhancement
- Color to grayscale adjustment
- Contour analysis to filter out non-text regions
Other than the image itself, some things to consider for expiration dates in general:
For the input we should take into consideration what would be most common for expiration dates, which would either be started by “Best by”, or “Use by”. Then the date would be divided by “.”, “/”. It would also be in MM/DD/YYYY format. We would also have to be able to take in only MM/DD inputs as well. This would also imply that software would have to keep track of either or both dates, complicating the database.
Project Design Updates
As of the current reporting period, there have been no modifications to the initial design of the project.
Schedule and Timeline
We are on track of our timeline. Even if the OCR implementation takes longer than expected, we have ample time for integration and testing during the week after Spring Break.