Shape detector

Inspiration

Many people who are visually impaired have difficulty independently learning things like the alphabet and recognizing shapes without a helper to assist them. This device allows users to have more independence when learning important motor skills related to drawing. Parents especially place heavy importance on the independence of their children who have disabilities, which this product emphasizes greatly.

What it does

This products detects shapes and tells us which shape we drew based on the lines we made on the screen.

How we built it

The program detects characteristic features of shapes (lines and angles) and puts them together to see if a shape was drawn. We read through the pygame documentation to determine how to solve some of the more complex tasks such as determining which angles are made where.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult being able to define how to make the program read out a shape based on the lines we drew. Defining the individual angles of the shapes we made and put those angles together was also difficult as we had to learn new pygame documentation to be applied in this project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We actually got the program to read out the shapes that are produced and it can function as a reasonable prototype that can be added upon. Compressing the huge amount of data from the mouse movement into a small dataset that can be read is especially something we are proud of.

What we learned

We learned that detecting geometrical shapes using python is more difficult than it first seems, but the challenge can be overcome if enough time and thought is taken into consideration.

What's next for the Shape detector

In the future this project can be used to recognize letters, thereby allowing the device to teach alphabetical skills to people who are visually impaired or even help teach how to write in different languages by importing foreign letters into a dataset for the program to recognize. This device can also be used to help those with speech impediments in the future as the device can be modified to detect words, and say that word when it is drawn.

Built With

• pygame
• python