Harvey Mudd College
Computer Science 153
Final Project
Presentations Thursday, December 14, 9:00 am

Final project requirements

• 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 proposal

• 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 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.