June 21, 2019

Azka Bukhari- Hogg Middle School: CS Educator

Face Detection

I started this week by trying to build a program that would detect a face in a still picture. After much frustration, Yong helped me add another line of code to my Haar Cascade. This helped my face detection program work- next step would be face detection via the webcam feed.

Yong and Presentation

Yong, our mentor, came by on the first day of the week. He laid out a step-by-step guide to help us emulate distancePPG. The first step was ‘Thresholding’- which means to turn an image into a 2D array-so it displays in only two colors: black and white. I had to put a hold on my facial detection plan and move to thresholding. Yong has been helping throughout this week- we started using Slack to share our code-he has helped me consistently when I get stuck.

Tuesday and Trotting

By Tuesday, I completed thresholding and facial detection with a still image and with the webcam feed. I took a break to focus on NumPy; I followed a tutorial online to help me learn a bit more about NumPy. This helped me learn the basics of NumPy. I knew I would be working from home on Wednesday- so I took all my notes home.

Gifts on Friday

Allen brought us food and a Pulse Oximeter. I’ve been thinking my TeachEngineering and using an Adafruit Circuit Playground to build a visual thermometer. This might allow me to create a Maker Challenge and I would like to use the IB Design Cycle, which is very close to the Engineering Design Cycle on the website. It is still quite early, so I might change my mind. One of the obvious benefits is that my advanced students have been using the Adafruit Circuit Playground-so they will be comfortable in using it. I wrap-up this week  contently, I’ve completed thresholding, face detection and I’m almost done with shape detection of a face-but it might be more complicated than it looks.