The quarter is winding down and this has allowed me to focus more time on the project. I have been writing a lot of php and javascript over the past week. The current goal is to finish up the image upload tool. This tool will allow anyone to contribute their bird images to our project. Most of the ui is finished and I am currently focusing on handling the images server side. We save the original copy of the image as well as some scaled variations of it. There is also the issue of maintaining records of who is providing the images. We can use this info to give credit to the photographers.
While writing these tools, I am trying to keep them abstract enough so that I can reuse them later on with minimal changes. These tools are being created so that we can expand the category of "birds," but when we add another category to the system it would be great if all the tools just worked.
Last Tuesday we had a Visipedia "retreat" at Caltech. It was my first visit to the campus and it was great to finally check it out. Members of the Visipedia project from UCSD, Caltech, and Cal went over future plans for the project. Subhransu Maji joined us as well and talked about some of his work. He has some cool ui's for key point annotation.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Image Upload Tool
Today I have been trying to catch up on some work for an image upload tool. The tool will be accessible through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website and will be used to collect images from their citizen scientists.
The process of making the webpage for the tool was made much easier (and cleaner) through the use of the Twitter Bootstrap tools. The design examples are good to go out of the box, and can be quickly thrown together to make a pretty good looking site. I also used the jQuery File Upload tool to handle the upload of the images. I didn't really encounter too many challenges getting this tool to work. There was an issue with generating thumbnails, but I just turned that feature off.
I need to get a representative image for each category, and I need to hook up the database to the site. Hopefully the tool should be functional by the end of the week.
Update on the App:
We moved the backend code from a school computer to an AWS machine. We transitioned an updated version of the code which has a new interface. The iPad app does not work well with the new interface, and I am still trying to debug the cause of the problems. So for now the app is down....
The process of making the webpage for the tool was made much easier (and cleaner) through the use of the Twitter Bootstrap tools. The design examples are good to go out of the box, and can be quickly thrown together to make a pretty good looking site. I also used the jQuery File Upload tool to handle the upload of the images. I didn't really encounter too many challenges getting this tool to work. There was an issue with generating thumbnails, but I just turned that feature off.
I need to get a representative image for each category, and I need to hook up the database to the site. Hopefully the tool should be functional by the end of the week.
Update on the App:
We moved the backend code from a school computer to an AWS machine. We transitioned an updated version of the code which has a new interface. The iPad app does not work well with the new interface, and I am still trying to debug the cause of the problems. So for now the app is down....
Monday, May 28, 2012
Migrating
This weekend we have been migrating the back end of Visipedia to an AWS server. The code has successfully been moved, but there was some issues with the API that the iPad app uses. Instead of migrating the version of Visipedia that is currently powering the iPad app, we decided to use the most recent stable version. With the change in code came some changes to the API. So I am now working to get the two systems back in sync.
After everything has stabilized I am planning on releasing another batch of the app to beta testers. If you are interested in testing the app, or helping us build and expand Visipedia, then let us know by filling out the form here.
After everything has stabilized I am planning on releasing another batch of the app to beta testers. If you are interested in testing the app, or helping us build and expand Visipedia, then let us know by filling out the form here.
Friday, May 11, 2012
At Cornell
We are over at Cornell checking out the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Visiting the lab has been a great experience and we have some great things planned for the future of Visipedia. Check out the digiscoped image I captured:
And here is the app working on helping me identify it:
And here is the app working on helping me identify it:
Why yes, it is the Mourning Warbler.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
In the mean time...
Quick update to ensure this blog is still alive:
The database schema has been migrated to our new Amazon services, so now I can starting hooking up the annotation tool. In the mean time I have been reading about object recognition from several different books. I have also been exploring the recent publications from Prof. Trevor Darrell's group. Its been a lot of reading so far, but it needs to be done. The plan is to test out some of these techniques on the new data set.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Refresh
After a bit of a hiatus, this blog will be back to normal and updated throughout Winter quarter 2012.
The Visipedia data is being refreshed, this time with some extra help. The Visipedia team is now being aided by the folks over at Cornell. Check 'em out:
We have begun work on creating a new and improved data set. This data set will contain more species and will be annotated by experts. We have also moved development of tools and storage of the data to a more reliable location through the services of Amazon EC2 and S3. For anyone new to these services, you can check them out here:
And you can find a helpful tutorial on spinning up a new machine here:
So far I am super impressed with these Amazon services. Setting everything up was easy, and its nice knowing that we have some reliability behind us. The next couple days will be spent working on the new annotation tool and building some php scripts to interface with our sql database.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Bigger Screen
I now have the app mirroring on an external screen/projector, which will make demoing that much easier. It has been tested on my desktop screen and the projectors at school. Check it out:
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