Maddie Status Report (2/16 – 2/22)

The start of my week was focused on preparing to present our design review, which happened Monday and (I think) went well! Since then I have been pretty sick, but was able to – thanks to a cocktail of basically every over-the-counter cold medicine known to man – make some progress on the image recombination algorithm.

I decided to start working with OpenCV, as it is more familiar to me and seems to be more well-documented. 

I’ve gotten some preliminary code working which is able to recombine images that I’ve broken up manually. I began with simple images, but then started testing with coral reef pictures, and was able to stitch them together successfully.

I went on to try and break images up both the vertical and horizontal directions, which failed miserably but brought up some good things for me to think about. Specifically, I realized that OpenCV only seems to support stitching together panoramic images. This doesn’t mean that we won’t be able to create a grid of n x m images, but we will have to be more deliberate about how the initial images are taken and ordered.

Additionally, when trying to stitch together 4 images, which were supposed to make up a 2×2 grid, I was given a success exit status from OpenCV, even though the resultant image was wildly incorrect. This brings to mind the need to validate resultant images more accurately than relying on exit codes.

Going into next week, I plan do the following::

• Develop and implement an algorithm that, given a folder of particularly named images, is able to recombine an n x m image.
• Implement code which more quickly can split up existing images into a folder of test images to combine, since generating tests manually is quite time consuming (I’ve developed the algorithm for this, but need to actually write the code)
• Run tests to specifically determine how much overlap feature is necessary for success
• Think about (but not implement yet) a better way to validate resultant images
  • This will be more necessary once we’re combining images taken by our robot, but for now we can just do pixel comparison to the original
• Investigate the impact of recombination (if any) to image quality
• (Likely not for next week, but another future consideration) Learn how to edit image metadata to include any necessary data/ordering information needed for recombination later

Going into next week, I am a bit ahead of schedule. This week’s work introduced a minor roadblock in that we won’t be able to automatically recombine images in 2 directions, however, because of my success with OpenCV (and not having to pivot libraries), I believe that I’ll be able to still be on schedule at the end of next week.

Below is an image of a coral reef which has been split up for recombination testing. Each green dot is a key point, which allows for overlap detection.