SpotTheDog

Inspiration

Countless dog owners have gone through the painful experience of searching for their missing dogs. Extremely laborious it is - to post the pictures of their lost dogs both online and offline. Adding to this challenge, the anxious owners would look for their missing dogs on many social media and platforms, scrolling through the ocean of information. A government-run institution for sheltering lost pets does exist somewhere, but they tend to be slow and their service comes with the possibility of death of beloved pets unless the owners hastily pick them up in time.

What it does

SpotTheDog App is a platform on which both the anxious owners and the caring witnesses of wandering dogs to upload dog images with location information. The application would then match the images of same dogs. This allows everyone to be involved in the effort of rescue and accelerates the searching process.

How we built it

We built the app with react native, employed opencv, dlib, and face_recognition python packages to develop our own machine learning model (spot_the_dog_model), and set up Firebase and AWS databases to store image and associated meta data.

Challenges we ran into

We were not familiar with back-end development so we had to learn within a limited amount of time. As well, connecting the machine learning python program and our app was extremely difficult; our team could have simply run the program locally, but since we wanted to decrease the size of the program, we decided to run the program in the database.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Originality:
- Currently, there is no commercially available app similar to SpotTheDog.
Utility:
- Our project raises awareness on lost or stray dogs.
- It would accelerate the searching process of missing dogs.
- It decentralizes the tasks involved in finding and maintaining missing dogs.
Execution and Polishness
- Completed the working project within 24 hours.
Complexity
- Quickly familiarized ourselves with new techniques / coding skills.

What we learned

We learned how to connect a python machine learning program and an app through database (Firebase and AWS).
We also learned how to use EXPO along with React Native.
We learned to combine different machine learning packages to create our own program.

What's next for SpotTheDog

We have minor limitations; for example, our machine learning program detect only frontal faces. In the future, we would try to overcome this limitation.