Following up on our plans from week 7 about using a 3D printed model of a tower in order to validate our results, we are glad to report that the model has been printed, and the process for setting up those tests has begun. We have not yet trained a model on data for the tower, but just for fun (and to see if it wanted to make our lives easier by just working immediately), we decided to run our object detection and tracking algorithm on a video of the tower model:
As you can see, it unfortunately is not working perfectly immediately. I’ll emphasize that this is this video is a very different environment compared to the videos that our object detection algorithm was trained on, so the fact that it’s performing this well at all is actually rather surprising. If it can do this well immediately, imagine how well it would do if we actually gave it some applicable training data.
If for whatever reason we really needed to use this model, the biggest problem of it picking up objects in the background, could also be fixed by just setting up piece of paper or something in the background, and just keeping that facing the camera to block out anything in the background.
So while these results aren’t particularly impressive without context, they nonetheless mark an important milestone, and help us to know where we need to focus our efforts in order to keep up with our plans for the future.