Spot 'Em

Spot 'em (endangered animals) and Save 'em!

Comment

Inspiration

The moment we heard USAA's challenge to create something helpful for Australia due to their wildfires, we knew it would be the best problem to solve while learning something meaningful out of it and truly helping society at the same time.

What it does

Our web-app Spot 'Em helps SAVE endangered animals from further harm by letting the public upload images of any endangered animals if they SPOT one. The app also informs the rightful authorities of the most recent location when it determines that the animal is indeed endangered.

How we built it

We used HTML, JS, and CSS to build our front-end section, and PHP, MySQL for our back-end. We also utilized Microsoft's Computer Vision API to determine whether the pictured animals are endangered or not, the Google Map API to pin point locations of the animals, and MySQL database to store information on the animals and their longitude-latitude coordinates.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges, from integrating the APIs to using them. But the toughest challenge we ran into was implementing the google firebase to store our data. The API was very complex and we couldn't get it to work perfectly, resulting in us having to depend on SQL for part of project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud about being able to complete the entire project and have a working model before the time for judgement. We are also extremely happy that we were able to integrate Computer Vision and Google Maps very successfully into our application.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how APIs are documented and how to get them to work how we want. We also learned how important feedback from other people is, as that was the biggest helping hand in the creation of our application.

What's next for Spot 'Em

The next step for Spot 'Em would be to not only help save endangered animals in Australia, but become a world-wide application where literally every person can help the next generations witness the wonders we were able to.

Share this project:

Updates