Final Year Project 2

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When it came to FYP 2, I started to realize that I had limited time to develop my Face Recognition application in which I had to begin from scratch and learn new things.

The first week of the semester, of course, I did nothing than just Youtube-ing not related videos, reading news, blogwalking and et cetera. I really love bikes so most of the times I spent my precious hours watching bloopers videos. Again, even the first week, I had initiated no contact with my supervisor and so did him. I do not know what happened between us, it looked like he did not really care about me or he was waiting for me to approach him? Never mind about that. Hehe

The following week, I began searching on face recognition, open source code, videos and completed products. My supervisor advised me to develop the application using open source platform as it is easier to be marketed since no license or approval needed. But then, I just started using MacBook since June 2015 and was not really familiar or know how to setup the environment of this laptop so that I can start coding. There is this one guy in my class that is quite good with programming (he was sent to Japan for IT Exhibition) and using MacBook, he is Wira Azharan. I went to him and asked him on the applications that needed to develop my project. Just in a day, I settled everything!

I found a website that teaches and provides a simple example of face recognition application. The explanations on the website are understandable but a problem arose when I try to run the codes via XCode, it always gave me errors like missing bla bla bla. I googled the errors to solve my problems because yeah, now everything can be found in Google. There were many suggestions on the problems but for Mac specifically, I was required to install extra modules of OpenCV. Then, I simply downloaded the files needed and followed all the installation procedure. Still, it could only solve partial of the problems. “contrib.hpp is missing” That was the error that I got every single time. I tried all the suggestions and got cornered by the same problem.

I gave up. I did not touch the coding for a week. I really felt bad about myself because of choosing a topic that was beyond my capability. Many things worried my then. I need to graduate, pass the Final Year Project and maintain my CGPA.

Day after day, I talked with my friends about changing my topic and they suggested me to seek opinion from my supervisor. The only idea came up was to build something that is really basic and simple like website. I learnt Website Development in my first year and it was not that hard. Plus, there are many templates available online.  So, one day, I texted my supervisor to meeting him but he was busy and only free after 5 pm. I was a scumbag so I cancelled the meeting last minute and went deafening silence after that. Haha Silly me.

Obviously, I am not a programmer and to develop a sophisticated application like face recognition sure is impossible.

Some of the seniors suggested me to hire an external party to develop a completed application for me in which I only have to do the documentation and presentation part. But then, I will learn nothing if I simply outsource the project from A-Z. 

I still remember, it was week 6 and I was struggling with the coding. I had 4 weeks or a month time window until the first submission and Pre-Sedex. I tried to develop the application on my own without any helps and of course, I was stuck at the same problem which was the execution. I had sleepless nights. Every time I went to bed, I always got myself thinking on how to solve the looping, the function and et cetera, and I ended up sitting in front of my laptop trying to fix things up. I skipped few classes. I lost my sleeping pattern which I only slept after 7am until 12pm. Still, those were fine until I started ordering Pizza Delivery. God. If you look through my online transaction, I had ordered numerous number of junk foods within a week. The Pizza, Pepsi, Chicken Wings, Chicken Fingers… Name it. Haha Not just that, it was like almost every night I spent my midnight at Mamak for “Supper” and the expenses incurred for food those days were tremendously higher than before.

Well, luckily, a man, who does not want to be acknowledged, he is an American based in California, he had helped me by providing his past project and guided me to understand every single line that I could use or implement in my project. He segregated all the functions into smaller piece which was easier for me to read and understand, and of course my project was merely based on his project but I did some improvements as his was really basic. After weeks, I finally managed to develop a complete face recognition application, was not that hard though as MATLAB has all the functions that I needed and the only thing that I had to know was the syntax. The “man” had taught me the basic syntax, functions and et cetera.

Though I have managed to complete the development, I was still not done with the documentation. I simply used the only report since I did not have any major changes on my project scope, all I needed to do was to delete the unnecessary parts. For the documentation, I had to update only one chapter, Chapter 4 : Results and Discussions, where all the results of development and testing will be placed under.

Alhamdulillah, I have presented my final presentation last week (VIVA) with internal Madam Mazeyanti and external Mr. Ashok Sivaji from MIMOS. They were both quite happy with my project and recommended me to join any conference to exhibit my project. They liked the concept of low cost solution in which only using simple method for face recognition instead of complicated and “hardcore” programming.

So, that is it. Hahaha I have finished my FYP 2 and everything went very well.

Thank you to all especially Dr BS (Californian) for the helps and guidance.


                                                 **p/s : My English is not that good but i'll brush it up. So, don't take it serious ;)