Sat, 22/Apr/2017

Between End Term 1 — Start Term 2

Deep Object Detection : decided to spend some time exploring. Compiled YOLO and streamed live camera video attached to my ‘rig’. Impressive object detection speed …

… but slow and limited when converted to an Android app :

Looks like SqueezeDet might be the new performant real-time object detection king. Will pick this up again in Term 3 as an Elective project.

Robotics Nanodegree : another amazing program by Udacity was launched and 1st-cohort is due to start in May. An awesome, connected and supportive community has already sprung up on Slack with lots of paper discussions, info sharing, myth-busting special guest chats and live company video interviews. I can’t wait to apply later this year after my Self-Driving Car Engineer program finishes.

Term 2, Project 1 — Extended Kalman Filters and Sensor Fusion in C++

Leading up to this project the program covered a lot of information : LIDAR + RADAR sensors, Kalman Filters in Python, C++ programming and Kalman Filters math. Andrei Vatavu (Sensor Fusion Engineer at Mercedes-Benz) did an excellent job of explaining the various process pipeline formulae and transforms, including the derivations. The provided kalman tracking viewer is an amazing tool that helped me visualise the performance of my model.

Fellow students have already done a great job of documenting Kalman Filters and Sensor Fusion so I won’t repeat it here.

I added Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) tests using Catch to my project. While this took extra time to setup, I’ve seen the benefit of developer tests too many times to ignore them, especially when using verbose languages like C++. Here is the output from a separate project executable I built to keep a check on the projects performance. Of course, all the tests pass :).

Note : read from bottom to top. I’ve reported this glitch.

I’d like to now replace Google Test with Catch in my deployment pipeline.