Zina’s Status Report for 2/10
The most important task I accomplished this week was giving my team’s proposal presentation to Section D on Monday. Last weekend, Ankita, Kaitlyn, and I put a lot of effort into making sure we covered all of the necessary components for the proposal. This process helped us all to get a better idea of all of the details we would need to consider going forward in order to succeed with our project. Once we were all on the same page and had established a clear vision to all work towards, we put together our slides and decided as a group that I would be in charge of presenting this one. I ran through the slides to practice what I would need to say several times before Monday morning. I felt prepared going into it, but then ended up getting a little bit nervous at presentation time which caused me to trip up a little bit on the first couple of slides. I do feel like I recovered well, though, and regained my confidence throughout the presentation.
The rest of the week for me was dedicated to collecting traffic video data that we can use to train our CV model. I have managed to find some good resources online to pull footage from. One particularly helpful website is trafficcamarcive.com, which allows you to view live camera footage from many large cities in the country. There are hundreds of cameras available in Pittsburgh alone, so I don’t think quantity of footage sources will be an issue. The biggest challenge, though, I have faced so far with this task is making sure that the recordings are high enough quality and that the camera angle is oriented in a similar way to what we had envisioned in our ultimate implementation. I am also trying to find an array of different traffic situations and sort the videos into corresponding categories so that we can ensure we are training our models with a wide variety of data.
The plan for next week is to work with Ankita to figure out exactly how we will want to implement cameras in our product and then decide what cameras make the most sense to purchase based on factors like size, convenience, and cost. We will then get these ordered so that I can begin work on connecting them to our Raspberry Pi and testing that everything works as intended.