Imagine having to trawl hundreds or even thousands of hours of video footages for forensics. Not only is this a tedious and painstaking process, the monotonous work also leads to fatigue and thus susceptibility to mistakes.
Team Odin’s Eye, comprising four year-three students from SMU School of Information Systems – Winston Ho, Dion Ang, Moses Yong and Jorden Seet - came up with a solution to reduce manpower and resources required to trawl video footages to provide accurate context.
Their solution, called LOKI or Look Over Key Images, uses a neural network to highlight interesting events in the video recordings so that investigators can cut to the chase and explore those first. The highlighted scenes will be captioned using natural language processing to provide description of the scenes.
The solution won the first prize and $3000 in the Open Category of the inaugural HackerFest organised by the Defence Science & Technology Agency (DSTA) on 24 to 25 November 2018 at Block71 Singapore.
Through this competition, DSTA was looking to partner start-ups, enterprises, academia and students to develop innovative solutions in image analytics, gamification and immersive technology to strengthen Singapore’s defence and security.
Teams in the competition were evaluated on originality and innovation, quality of prototype, feasibility and adaptability, as well as technical assessment.
Moses Yong said, “As my first hackathon, it was a rollercoaster ride. Having joined the competition just looking for exposure to broaden my horizons, it has been a wonderful journey with engaging interactions with the DSTA engineers and my team. It was my first time applying AI concepts in a real life situation and there was constant stress with us having to work on the pitch and prototype simultaneously. When we got pushed up to Open Category from the Student Category, the competition became a lot stiffer. We did not expect to win at all, but we did! In all, it has truly been a memorable experience.”
The team is currently working with DSTA to develop a minimum viable product. After that, they will explore with DSTA on how to integrate the solution with other local solutions for real world application.
Featured photo: The winning team from SMU School of Information Systems, comprising (R-L) Dion Ang, Moses Yong, Jorden Seet and Winston Ho, received their winner’s certificate from Ms Gayle Chan Wei Ee, Director, Digital Hub, DSTA. (Photo: DSTA)
