Harvey Mudd College
Computer Science 153
Assignment 4
Due Monday, November 13, by midnight
Final project proposal
Your final project proposal need not be long, but you should include
the following parts (perhaps a paragraph or so on each):
- Overall project description
What you'd like to do
and how you can evaluate it. You should consider the
scope of your project here -- in particular, suggest
ways that the project could be limited or simplified, if
need be, as well as some ways in which it could naturally
expand.
- References
Include at least one, but preferably three or more, references
to work you've found that is related to your project. Consider the
similarities and differences between that work and what you'd
like to do (even if just based on initial impressions). How
helpful do you feel each reference will be? Include the
location of the resources (web site, book title, paper reference)
(that way I can get more familiar with them...).
- System and Starting point
Explain how you intend to start the project. Particulars of the
start-up include the language (and
perhaps platform) under which you anticipate working and the source
for input to your system (still images and where they'll come from, or,
perhaps, video from somewhere). Are there any hardware requirements
that I need to be aware of (so we can start setting things up)?
Describe in as much detail as you can a small initial piece of the
project that you intend to start with. Also suggest a number of
separate pieces that will comprise the whole system: what are your
initial thoughts on the order in which to attack them?
Are there any that will be more difficult than others?
Final project requirements
The final project requires three things: a meeting part of the
way through to evaluate progress, a write-up, and a presentation
with a demo of the system you're building. The following
includes a bit more detail on these points.
- Meeting
At some point in the two weeks before the end of classes,
each team should
schedule a meeting with me to evaluate progress on the
final project. To help with this scheduling, the class time
on November 30 and December 5 will not be used as lecture or
lab time, but reserved for meetings or work on the project.
At the meeting, plan on demonstrating some piece of
your system. (This guarantees that coding has at least begun!)
Also, it will give us a chance to evaluate the overall
scope of the project and discuss ways of progressing from
its current state.
- Write-up
The write-up is the formal documentation for the project. Although the
format is not required to adhere to any particular form, the following
sections outline a common approach to covering the important points:
- An Introduction that motivates and describes the problem
and the results at a high level.
- A Background section that explains the basics of
the algorithms you applied to the problem.
- A System Description section that provides the
details of how you constructed your system, how it works,
and how you tailored the algorithms described in the previous
section to the problem at hand.
- A Results section that describes how well the
system performs. A format that often works well here is
to first explain your evaluation techniques, provide their
results, and then explain those results and what they
say about the problem and about your approach(es) to it.
- A Conclusion, usually very brief, in which you can
summarize your system and the results. In addition, this
is a chance to be less scientific in your opinions about
the project and a chance to put it
in the larger context of larger, more general problems
(such as the general vision problem or a broad subfield).
The write-up should not include a print out of code, but should
indicate where that code (and, if applicable, test data) is available.
The write-up is due any time on Thursday, December 14.
- Presentation
The presentation is a chance to summarize your project and results
in a compact, semi-public forum. It need not be long (10-15 min.)
and should include roughly the same components as the write-up,
along with a demonstration of your system. The presentations for
all of the projects will be schedules for the final exam time:
9:00 AM on December 14. However, you may schedule it earlier if you
like.
Final project ideas
Any open-ended vision problem is likely to be too difficult
to solve completely. As a result, I would suggest narrowing
ideas a great deal -- by making simplifying assumptions about
the domain, for example.
Basically, projects fall under two broad headings: specific applications or
comparative research.
For the latter, the idea is to implement and investigate the realtive
performance of some set of vision algorithms. The key contribution here
is both summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of each and quantifying
where they success and they they fail.
These powerpoint slides suggest a number of
possibilities.