CV-FS -- Computer Vision Flag Scanner

Inspiration

When thinking about the project, we wanted to work on the area of minimizing the risk of hurting a civilian or our military during the war. Since most military personnel have a flag on their arm, we decided to work on a flag scanner that will help detect people from the army using a program that detects a flag.

What it does

This software uses computer vision to analyze the RGB values of an image. If the correlation between an image and the American Flag is a certain amount, the model returns the PASS result.

How I built it

I used OpenCV, which is a popular computer vision library with bindings for different programming languages as the core part of the program. It uses OpenCV’s matchTemplate function in Python to get a result from a negative one to one, indicating the similarity between a template image and the image to be compared with it. From there, it checks if the correlation value is above a certain threshold, which we selected through testing with different flags. I also implemented a command line parser, argparse, which makes it easy to use the program with different input and template images.

Challenges I ran into

I’ve run into several challenges while making this program, such as finding the right use of the matchTemplate function to find the correlation array and finding the perfect threshold value for determining if the image passed or failed the similarity test.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Throughout the Hackathon, we’ve used machine learning to successfully find if an image correlates with the American flag.

What I learned

From the 24 hours spent with our team, We’d say together we learned more about ai/ml as well as how to work together as a team to brainstorm ideas and help each other when we are stuck. We also learned more about humanitarian laws as well as the war in general.

What's next for CV-FS -- Computer Vision Flag Scanner

Some other future implementations can be to make it work for other countries' flags to, for example: distinguish an object from an Indian flag instead of the American flag, Recognize where the flag is placed on a soldier’s uniform, Look for medals on a soldiers uniform for extra confirmation as well as the rank of the soldier Recognizing injured soldiers