FYP idea, wot ya think?

Farls

Hey guys,

I've done this for the past two years and its proved really helpful so might as well give it a bash again (this being getting feedback from you lot!), story is i'm in my final year of CS now and choosing a project. I really want to do a project that will help me in interviews in the future and pull fairly big marks.

The current ideas i have are these.

3D House Estimator

2 approachs -

Get plans onto pc, create 3D model of house to look around/inside(maybe) with a database running in the background to put up an estimation for the cost of building going by the dimensions. ie, price of blocks,slates,insulation etc.

second approach could have a user interface where they fill in the dimensions of the house and then a 3D model is then made of it using these dimensions, problem here would be implementing inside walls for rooms etc.

The main problem i'm having here is figuring out how exactly to go about this like getting the plans on 2D onto the puter?

Thats my main idea and it like it best because its the only really original one i have at the moment!

I want to learn OpenGl as well this year and this would gave me a chance to do that.

If i don't do that i've been advised by a supervisor here to do a 3D game because good ones normally pull big marks, so any ideas on what game if the other idea falls through?

So any idea's or opinions greatly appreciated as always

Farlz

stevenmu

What type of plans are you talking about ? If you just mean a 2d plan view (I think that's what it's called) of each floor you could use a simple line recognition algorithm to pick out the walls and have pattern matching to pick out doors,stairs and windows etc. You could either allow them scan the plans in or provide them in an image file. It's probably best if you control the format the plans are created in so that you can control exactly how items are represented in the plan/image. FYPs really just need to prove the concept as opposed to having something you can throw in a box and put on a store shelf.

You might have more fun with the 3d game idea though, wish my supervisor let me do one of those

Farls

Yes, i was thinking of just getting the 2D view of each floor onto the pc as an image file, do this by scanning it in, or if i could figure out someway of maybe using AutoCad to create an image of the plan it would be excellent.

Then as you say use a line recognition algorithm to pick out the walls, and pattern matching for the windows, would have to really look into this though because i've never attempted anything like this before. any info would be greatly appreciated.


The 3D game does sound fun to do but it's hard to pick a game to actually do that hasn't been done to death!

Farlz

stevenmu

I don't really know much about it, I just remember bits and pieces from the machine vision course I did in 4th year. Basically you treat the image as a 2d array, I'm sure there a packages out there for pretty much any language to do this. If it's just black and white it makes things easier, you can think of the images as 2d arrays of 1s an 0s. For pattern recognition you have a small 2d array (say 10x10) with the image of say a door in it. you then start by comparing this image to the top left 10x10 pixels in the main plan image to see how much matches you then move down a row and do it again and work your way through the whole image like that. Doors could be drawn in 4 different directions so you'll have to go through it all 4 times with your door image facing each way. To find lines you just look through the array for 1's and then look at the elements to find adjoining cells with 1's in them too.

It's generally pretty simple as long as you have control over the plans that get fed in, so you already have appropriate door images and know what colours to look for etc. Googling "machine vision", "pattern recognition" and "line recognition" should turn up plenty of stuff. There's already very good algorithms out there for doing all this

Farls

Cheers for that hi, that simple but frank explanation has really got my head around this, far better idea of what i'm looking to do now.

karma going your way.

Farlz