Itseez summer schools on computer vision: how it was
This year, the company Itseez held two summer events for students interested in the subject of computer vision - the Interuniversity School and the Summer Internship. Here we will talk about both past events: about the School, which was conducted jointly with the Institute of ITMM of UNN them. N.I. Lobachevsky, and Internship, which the guys were directly at the company Itseez.
We will share how the training was conducted, how the participants were selected and in general how it all happened. In winter, the next event for students is planned - the winter school on optimizing the performance of computer vision applications. Therefore, this article may be of particular interest to those who would like to take part in the future educational activities of Itseez.
Of course, one of the first questions that arose during the preparation was who is the target audience of these two events and how quickly to convey to people what we would like to see among the participants.
')
Since this was the first such project (but not the last one!), For the beginning we decided to limit the participation of students and graduates of higher educational institutions of Nizhny Novgorod (UNN, HSE, NSTU, NNSACU). The information was placed in the group of Itseez VKontakte, as well as was distributed in the form of posters and flyers in universities and public target schools.
We were also able to hold face-to-face meetings with some students, and they had the opportunity to personally ask questions to the organizers of the Schools. Despite the fact that the announcements appeared relatively late (the end of the semester, many went to the session), we received many applications, which were pleasantly surprised. The competition was about 5 people per place, with a total of 150 applications.
A large number of applications naturally raised the question of how to effectively conduct the selection of participants in a relatively short time period. After lengthy discussions, we decided that the face-to-face interview was the best of forms, in full accordance with the principle that it’s better to see and talk once than read the questionnaire 100 times.
Two full-time working days, three commissions composed of Itseez engineers and teachers of UNN interviewed all 150 candidates. Unfortunately, not all candidates have completely coped with the tasks proposed at the interview. As we like to repeat, to work in the field of computer vision it is necessary to have good fundamental knowledge in the field of mathematics and computer science. Therefore, the questions we asked were mainly borrowed from the 1-2 curriculum of technical specialties. There were questions of two groups: in mathematics and programming. In the first part, we mainly tested knowledge from classical courses in linear algebra, analytic geometry, discrete mathematics, probability theory and others. On programming, the questions were mainly on C / C ++ and OOP. Sometimes questions put contenders in a “dead end”, but sometimes they generated a stream of thought leading to the right decision!
It was really difficult for us to make decisions (the number of places in the School and the Internship was limited) and we sincerely hope that no one was offended, but made the necessary conclusions, and in the future it will be 100% ready. Please do not forget that we are waiting for you again, for the road will be by walking! You can find the link to apply for our new programs below.
Also good news is that in the future we decided to expand the so-called category of “free listeners”. In fact, anyone, bypassing the competition, will be able to attend lectures and perform tasks at home on their own. Of course, as a rule, full-time work with a teacher is more useful, but in this format, students will be able to participate more flexibly, and at the same time check their level and, if necessary, pull it up.
In the meantime, for the organizers, the main time for the substantial preparation of the School has come: the formation of a schedule, the preparation of presentations for lectures and the development of materials for practical exercises. As well as a lot of chores to create all the conditions and the participants could feel comfortable during the whole period of their stay at the Internship and School. So, what came out of it.
The internship is primarily aimed at senior students, undergraduates and graduates. The main goal is to prepare for the subsequent employment in “combat” IT projects. Two months (July-August) of intensive work in real projects under the leadership of Itseez employees allowed the guys to touch real tasks from the field of computer vision. In total this year there were 13 interns.
Interns
Each intern was officially employed during the internship and could try on the role of a novice researcher-developer. As is often the case in the industry, for reasons of confidentiality, we cannot put here detailed information regarding the content of projects. We can only say that a typical project was the implementation of a certain state-of-the-art article describing a computer vision algorithm. The guys were involved in solving many basic tasks, such as detecting lines and text in an image, assessing the position of the human body, calibrating the camera, the task of segmentation, and others. The following are examples of demonstration videos made by interns.
Line detection and vanishing point
Road marking detection
Kalman filter smoothing
Iris segmentation
Also, several guys were engaged exclusively in performance optimization using the example of functions from the OpenCV library and the OpenVX standard. In one of the future posts we will try to tell you more about one of these tasks.
The results of the work were presented in the internal seminars of the Itseez company and highly appreciated by mentors and colleagues. Many guys received interesting job offers in the company. Below you can read the feedback from participants on the internship.
Pavel (UNN them. Lobachevsky, IITMM / VMK, graduate)
“The company liked the atmosphere most of all. All employees of the company from directors to service personnel are always friendly and kind. We have a small project. Therefore, there were no difficulties with communications within the project. Each team member is always ready to help and prompt. This internship is ideal for starting your career in IT and Computer Vision. It also allows senior students, without looking up from their studies, to acquire practical skills in the development of industrial code and complex systems and to understand the principles of operation and design of IT companies that are necessary for young employees. ”
Mikhail (UNN them. Lobachevsky, IITMM / VMK, 6 year)
“Along with the means to solve an interesting task under the guidance of an experienced curator and under ideal conditions for this, the internship provided me with another very valuable opportunity - to observe people who truly love their job. These people literally infect with their passion, creative spirit and hard work. They helped me form ideas and overcome technical difficulties, for which I am extremely grateful to them. The internal atmosphere of the company is special. The seminars are dominated by the atmosphere of a large family. The organization of work at height, in such an environment can progress very quickly. I am very grateful to Itseez for the invaluable experience and just a good time. ”
Nikolay (UNN them. Lobachevsky, IITMM / VMK, 4 course)
“For me, this is not the first experience as a programmer, but there is still a large amount of research work added. The seemingly well-forgotten mathematics from the first years of the university was surprisingly quickly remembered, its new experience was its application in practice when creating algorithms, it was impressive to see real results on real images. In general, it was nice to see that computer vision is one of those areas where theory and practice are very close, mathematically derived calculations are immediately implemented and verified. ”
Roman (UNN them. Lobachevsky, IITMM / VMK, graduate)
“Among the employees of my project I was attracted by their genuine enthusiasm and sense of purpose. I got into a promising project and there is a chance to become a direct participant in entering the market of a new technology, which just yesterday seemed like a fantasy. If you want to gain experience or work in a company that makes projects on a global level, you are not afraid of complex tasks and want to find an application for your university knowledge bag - you are here. ”
The school , unlike internships, is a shorter event. Two weeks, which required a high level of concentration and concentration from children. There were 22 participants and a number of free listeners.
Summer schoolchildren
The tight schedule of lectures and practical classes in the first week did not allow to relax for a minute. Each day of the first week was devoted to a separate topic:
Two morning lectures from Itseez engineers provided the necessary theoretical basis for the implementation of practical tasks. Sometimes the children didn’t have enough time to practice (two university pairs), but, despite their fatigue, they remained in the terminal classes and brought their decisions.
School materials are posted on GitHub and anyone can read the presentations and / or try to complete practical tasks. We tried to make materials as accessible and open as possible by providing them with step-by-step instructions. We will be glad if someone finds errors, occists or simply decides to improve job descriptions and sends Pull Requests to GitHub :) And for those who are not yet aware of what Pull Request is, welcome to the first lecture on tools and The first practical lesson of our school!
Learn again!
The second week of the School was mainly focused on project work. Each day began with a lecture in which they met with some interesting project of the Itseez company, after which the day was devoted to working in teams. The children were offered topics for mini-projects on the subject of computer vision, which they had to perform, united in small groups. Here are the themes of this year's projects .
The creative mood of the project work made everyone sit up in the evenings, get interesting and sometimes “fun” results that were demonstrated on the protection of projects. Below you can find examples of the work of the developed applications. The presentations presented by the guys at the defense, as well as video with the results of work, are available on GitHub .
Confusion matrix in solving the problem of recognizing school participants
Search results for flat texture objects in the image
The result of coin detection using the Hough transform
It is important to note that despite the short period of time and the lack of familiarity with the subject of computer vision in most of the participants before school, all the teams obtained significant results! Each group of participants demonstrated a working application, and some developments are fully worthy of the level of coursework and even theses. Such a high level definitely inspires optimism about the future of the guys.
When the defense passed, and everyone was awarded with memorable certificates and gifts, it was a sad time to leave ... We celebrated the end of the summer events by visiting bowling, pizza with drinks and just a pleasant company.
We were glad to see everyone and say thank you for your courage and perseverance. I'd like to believe that the participants will begin to apply the acquired knowledge and skills in life and will be able to achieve amazing results in their work!
The authors:
Valentina Kustikova, Assistant of the MOST Department, Institute ITMM, UNN them. N.I. Lobachevsky
Kirill Kornyakov, Director of Research and Development at Itseez
PS Registration is already open for participation in the Winter School Itseez, which will be dedicated to optimizing performance and will be held on the basis of UNN them. Lobachevsky during the winter holidays 2016. We invite students from Nizhny Novgorod universities to participate, starting from the third year and older: bit.ly/itseez-student (registration is until December 01, 2015, questions can be asked at student@itseez.com ).
We will share how the training was conducted, how the participants were selected and in general how it all happened. In winter, the next event for students is planned - the winter school on optimizing the performance of computer vision applications. Therefore, this article may be of particular interest to those who would like to take part in the future educational activities of Itseez.
How to find out about the event?
Of course, one of the first questions that arose during the preparation was who is the target audience of these two events and how quickly to convey to people what we would like to see among the participants.
')
Since this was the first such project (but not the last one!), For the beginning we decided to limit the participation of students and graduates of higher educational institutions of Nizhny Novgorod (UNN, HSE, NSTU, NNSACU). The information was placed in the group of Itseez VKontakte, as well as was distributed in the form of posters and flyers in universities and public target schools.
We were also able to hold face-to-face meetings with some students, and they had the opportunity to personally ask questions to the organizers of the Schools. Despite the fact that the announcements appeared relatively late (the end of the semester, many went to the session), we received many applications, which were pleasantly surprised. The competition was about 5 people per place, with a total of 150 applications.
Competitive selection of participants
A large number of applications naturally raised the question of how to effectively conduct the selection of participants in a relatively short time period. After lengthy discussions, we decided that the face-to-face interview was the best of forms, in full accordance with the principle that it’s better to see and talk once than read the questionnaire 100 times.
Two full-time working days, three commissions composed of Itseez engineers and teachers of UNN interviewed all 150 candidates. Unfortunately, not all candidates have completely coped with the tasks proposed at the interview. As we like to repeat, to work in the field of computer vision it is necessary to have good fundamental knowledge in the field of mathematics and computer science. Therefore, the questions we asked were mainly borrowed from the 1-2 curriculum of technical specialties. There were questions of two groups: in mathematics and programming. In the first part, we mainly tested knowledge from classical courses in linear algebra, analytic geometry, discrete mathematics, probability theory and others. On programming, the questions were mainly on C / C ++ and OOP. Sometimes questions put contenders in a “dead end”, but sometimes they generated a stream of thought leading to the right decision!
It was really difficult for us to make decisions (the number of places in the School and the Internship was limited) and we sincerely hope that no one was offended, but made the necessary conclusions, and in the future it will be 100% ready. Please do not forget that we are waiting for you again, for the road will be by walking! You can find the link to apply for our new programs below.
Also good news is that in the future we decided to expand the so-called category of “free listeners”. In fact, anyone, bypassing the competition, will be able to attend lectures and perform tasks at home on their own. Of course, as a rule, full-time work with a teacher is more useful, but in this format, students will be able to participate more flexibly, and at the same time check their level and, if necessary, pull it up.
In the meantime, for the organizers, the main time for the substantial preparation of the School has come: the formation of a schedule, the preparation of presentations for lectures and the development of materials for practical exercises. As well as a lot of chores to create all the conditions and the participants could feel comfortable during the whole period of their stay at the Internship and School. So, what came out of it.
Internship
The internship is primarily aimed at senior students, undergraduates and graduates. The main goal is to prepare for the subsequent employment in “combat” IT projects. Two months (July-August) of intensive work in real projects under the leadership of Itseez employees allowed the guys to touch real tasks from the field of computer vision. In total this year there were 13 interns.
Interns
Each intern was officially employed during the internship and could try on the role of a novice researcher-developer. As is often the case in the industry, for reasons of confidentiality, we cannot put here detailed information regarding the content of projects. We can only say that a typical project was the implementation of a certain state-of-the-art article describing a computer vision algorithm. The guys were involved in solving many basic tasks, such as detecting lines and text in an image, assessing the position of the human body, calibrating the camera, the task of segmentation, and others. The following are examples of demonstration videos made by interns.
Line detection and vanishing point
Road marking detection
Kalman filter smoothing
Iris segmentation
Also, several guys were engaged exclusively in performance optimization using the example of functions from the OpenCV library and the OpenVX standard. In one of the future posts we will try to tell you more about one of these tasks.
The results of the work were presented in the internal seminars of the Itseez company and highly appreciated by mentors and colleagues. Many guys received interesting job offers in the company. Below you can read the feedback from participants on the internship.
Pavel (UNN them. Lobachevsky, IITMM / VMK, graduate)“The company liked the atmosphere most of all. All employees of the company from directors to service personnel are always friendly and kind. We have a small project. Therefore, there were no difficulties with communications within the project. Each team member is always ready to help and prompt. This internship is ideal for starting your career in IT and Computer Vision. It also allows senior students, without looking up from their studies, to acquire practical skills in the development of industrial code and complex systems and to understand the principles of operation and design of IT companies that are necessary for young employees. ”
Mikhail (UNN them. Lobachevsky, IITMM / VMK, 6 year)“Along with the means to solve an interesting task under the guidance of an experienced curator and under ideal conditions for this, the internship provided me with another very valuable opportunity - to observe people who truly love their job. These people literally infect with their passion, creative spirit and hard work. They helped me form ideas and overcome technical difficulties, for which I am extremely grateful to them. The internal atmosphere of the company is special. The seminars are dominated by the atmosphere of a large family. The organization of work at height, in such an environment can progress very quickly. I am very grateful to Itseez for the invaluable experience and just a good time. ”
Nikolay (UNN them. Lobachevsky, IITMM / VMK, 4 course)“For me, this is not the first experience as a programmer, but there is still a large amount of research work added. The seemingly well-forgotten mathematics from the first years of the university was surprisingly quickly remembered, its new experience was its application in practice when creating algorithms, it was impressive to see real results on real images. In general, it was nice to see that computer vision is one of those areas where theory and practice are very close, mathematically derived calculations are immediately implemented and verified. ”
Roman (UNN them. Lobachevsky, IITMM / VMK, graduate)“Among the employees of my project I was attracted by their genuine enthusiasm and sense of purpose. I got into a promising project and there is a chance to become a direct participant in entering the market of a new technology, which just yesterday seemed like a fantasy. If you want to gain experience or work in a company that makes projects on a global level, you are not afraid of complex tasks and want to find an application for your university knowledge bag - you are here. ”
School
The school , unlike internships, is a shorter event. Two weeks, which required a high level of concentration and concentration from children. There were 22 participants and a number of free listeners.
Summer schoolchildren
The tight schedule of lectures and practical classes in the first week did not allow to relax for a minute. Each day of the first week was devoted to a separate topic:
- Monday - programming tools: Git, GitHub, CMake, Google Test
- Tuesday - introduction to working with the computer vision library OpenCV
- Wednesday - detection of objects in the image
- Thursday - tracking objects in the video
- Friday - a small excursion into performance optimization
Two morning lectures from Itseez engineers provided the necessary theoretical basis for the implementation of practical tasks. Sometimes the children didn’t have enough time to practice (two university pairs), but, despite their fatigue, they remained in the terminal classes and brought their decisions.
School materials are posted on GitHub and anyone can read the presentations and / or try to complete practical tasks. We tried to make materials as accessible and open as possible by providing them with step-by-step instructions. We will be glad if someone finds errors, occists or simply decides to improve job descriptions and sends Pull Requests to GitHub :) And for those who are not yet aware of what Pull Request is, welcome to the first lecture on tools and The first practical lesson of our school!
Learn again!
The second week of the School was mainly focused on project work. Each day began with a lecture in which they met with some interesting project of the Itseez company, after which the day was devoted to working in teams. The children were offered topics for mini-projects on the subject of computer vision, which they had to perform, united in small groups. Here are the themes of this year's projects .
The creative mood of the project work made everyone sit up in the evenings, get interesting and sometimes “fun” results that were demonstrated on the protection of projects. Below you can find examples of the work of the developed applications. The presentations presented by the guys at the defense, as well as video with the results of work, are available on GitHub .
Confusion matrix in solving the problem of recognizing school participants
Search results for flat texture objects in the image
The result of coin detection using the Hough transform
It is important to note that despite the short period of time and the lack of familiarity with the subject of computer vision in most of the participants before school, all the teams obtained significant results! Each group of participants demonstrated a working application, and some developments are fully worthy of the level of coursework and even theses. Such a high level definitely inspires optimism about the future of the guys.
All good things come to an end ...
When the defense passed, and everyone was awarded with memorable certificates and gifts, it was a sad time to leave ... We celebrated the end of the summer events by visiting bowling, pizza with drinks and just a pleasant company.
We were glad to see everyone and say thank you for your courage and perseverance. I'd like to believe that the participants will begin to apply the acquired knowledge and skills in life and will be able to achieve amazing results in their work!
The authors:
Valentina Kustikova, Assistant of the MOST Department, Institute ITMM, UNN them. N.I. Lobachevsky
Kirill Kornyakov, Director of Research and Development at Itseez
PS Registration is already open for participation in the Winter School Itseez, which will be dedicated to optimizing performance and will be held on the basis of UNN them. Lobachevsky during the winter holidays 2016. We invite students from Nizhny Novgorod universities to participate, starting from the third year and older: bit.ly/itseez-student (registration is until December 01, 2015, questions can be asked at student@itseez.com ).
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/270481/
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