Mini Poster Sessions

This week we had mini poster sessions in order to discuss the basics of our projects, especially highlighting what we’ve accomplished so far, and what we foresee as obstacles moving forward.

My ideas for the layout of the program were well received, though this may change as I begin implementation. I envision the layout to look similar to programs like Adobe Photoshop and Bluebeam Revu, by having both a toolbar across the top, containing options like “Save Drawing”, “Create New”, and “Load Existing”, as well as a toolbar down the side, which will allow the user to add, move, and remove walls, cameras, and obstacles.

Some of the issues I foresee in the future is how to prevent the camera from seeing through obstacles and walls and how to graphically display that, along with dealing with the overlap of the cameras’ rays. A couple of related solutions suggested include:

• Creating a “grid” which the locations of walls and obstacles lock to
  • This would allow me to calculate the location of such obstructions behind-the-scenes, as they’re locked in place
• Use color
  • The obstacles will be one color with a border around it. The rays from the camera will hit that border and not draw the line beyond that point.
  • Part of completing this will include making borders and walls have a decent thickness in order to prevent bleed through
  • Giving cameras color will also help with showing the overlap between cameras
    • This may be done with masking bits

One of the suggestions to consider brought up was allowing the user the choice to turn a camera on and off. This would allow the user to see if they still have enough coverage if a camera goes down, or if they should figure in a bit more redundancy. Another thing to think about was camera FOV and if the cameras should be wall mount only, which is a decision I will have to make in the near future. This is a topic I can reconsider down the line, if time allows.

Some of my goals for the next week are to experiment with detecting color from an onscreen pixel, and to read the paper on the Security Guard Problem, provided by Dr. McVey. This will allow me to continue tackling the problem from multiple angles, coming ever closer to my end goal.