[Hacktoberfest] On my way to Open Source Career

Prify Philip — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 07:05:07 +0000

I graduated as a Computer Engineer on September 2020. Yeah well, that's just for a name sake. What did I learn this 4 years ? Nothing ! Absolutely nothing ! Am I going for a negative, bad vibe story ? Not really.

It was during the month of March 2020 when the prime minister declared lockdown. I realized that, until now I was just wasting my time, while my peers was learning something new and achieving on their way. What to do now ? I scrolled down through a lot of posts from my peers in LinkedIn and they have achieved almost everything that I have only started to dream of. OK ! They are ahead of me. No, I am really lagging behind. There is a huge gap between us. How am I suppose to shrink that. I should give up. Then again, now I am having a lot of free time. I can compensate the time I have wasted (** cough 4 years **)

Complaining is not an option. I am not competing with anyone but me, the old me ! I started learning and made up my mind to keep a GitHub daily streak. It was hard at first though.

I started joining hackathons. At first, it was all about swags ! I wanted to collect them. That's when I heard about Hacktoberfest ! More swags (lol)

Hacktoberfest started of pretty well. But, I didn't knew what to contribute to. I realized that, it is harder than I thought. I have to learn if I want to contribute. Yeah, I have to learn (I am trapped). It was a slow process but, worth it. I started contributing. I forgot about the swags. As a starter, I was scared (and ashamed) to ask to anyone about my doubts. But, this community is really (really x million times) welcoming. They are the best. I am so happy to be a part of it now. A family.

I admit it.... I am in love with Open Source now (blame is on Hacktoberfest). I am thinking about pursuing my career on the same. I am just a beginner and have a long way to go. But, I will surely contribute

A big thanks to Hacktoberfest and the whole community.

Sign Language Translator to Malayalam

Prify Philip — Wed, 20 May 2020 08:28:32 +0000

# We haven't finished our project. We couldn't collect required dataset due to Pandemic breakout. So we are making our own at home.

Malayalam sign language is different because it have no signs for letters. It as only signs for words and most signs are expressed using upper half of the body.

As most of the signs consist of movements, we are using video dataset.

Videos are splited into image frames. 7 to 9 frames per video and used Openpose for finding the image points.

My Final Project

Link to Code
{% github https://github.com/Amchuz/Action-Recognition-in-Colab %}

I collected videos of 10 Types of actions: ['വീട്', 'ജോലി', 'സഹായിക്കൂ', 'വെള്ളം', 'വൈകുന്നേരം', 'അമ്മ', 'ആശുപത്രി', 'മഴ', 'കുട', 'ബസ് സ്റ്റോപ്പ്']. The total video lengths are about 21 mins, containing about 10000 video frames recorded at 10 frames per second.

The workflow of the algorithm is:

-Get the joints' positions by OpenPose.
-Track each person. Euclidean distance between the joints of two
  skeletons is used for matching two skeletons.
-Fill in a person's missing joints by these joints' relative pos in
  previous frame. 
-Add noise to the (x, y) joint positions to try to augment data.
-Use a window size of 0.5s (5 frames) to extract features.
-Extract features of 
              (1) body velocity and          
              (2) normalized joint positions        
              (3) joint velocities.
-Apply PCA to reduce feature dimension to 80. Classify by DNN of 3
  layers of 50x50x50 (or switching to other classifiers in one line). 
-Mean filtering the prediction scores between 2 frames. Add label
  above the person if the score is larger than 0.8.

During this locked down, I got time to research more on this topic. But using video frames as dataset was a challenge as My laptop didn't had much space. But one day morning my ubuntu partition was deleted accidentally and to resolve it I had to buy a software. As the only important document I had in Ubuntu was my project, decided to reinstall the OS. I started the project again from scratch. But,the good news was now I had enough memory space. This journey of my project taught me that, everything happens for a reason. We just have to find the bright side.

I will updating the project code in a week.

I can't believe four years have passed and I am going to be a graduate soon.

Thank you GitHub. The place where I learned to grow.

DEV Community: Prify Philip

[Hacktoberfest] On my way to Open Source Career

A big thanks to Hacktoberfest and the whole community.

Sign Language Translator to Malayalam

My Final Project