Designing the Front Page using XML Coding

As we waited for the machine learning models to be ready, the Android Studio team decided to work on the User Interface first. Although android studio provides a drag and drop tool to assist in designing pages (strictly speaking, activities), Wei Bin had ran into some problems whilst using them. The alignment became a huge mess as everything is aligned to the top right. After quite a bit of googling and cycling between different layouts (linear layout, relative layout…), we managed to find a solution by attaching each object to the bottom of each other and inputting blank spaces to widen elements if necessary. Coding for image buttons in the activities also came up with unexpected issues. As the boxes are much smaller than the original images, we had to play with some of the values such as padding to make sure that the image is not too zoomed in.

Getting Acquainted with Machine Learning

The next step forward is to understand the basics of machine learning, the different kinds of machine algorithms used and the type of algorithms suitable for object detection. The popular models used are Single Shot Detection (SSD), You Only Look Once (YOLO) and Faster RCNNs (Regions with Convoluted Neural Networks). While Jian Xian attempted to understand the basics of the models, it proved to be very difficult as these models are highly mathematical and it is not practical to understand each model. Hence, he opted to understand the overarching tensorflow process from data labelling to pre-training and fine tuning. In addition, he had to read up on important configurable parameters such as learning rate, quantisation, decay factors etc.

By reading up on the topic, he managed to understand how machine learning works on the surface, just enough for him to configure the parameters needed.