Project Spotlight: Best Friends
UW Blueprint is a student run club that provides top-tier tech for non-profit organizations. Founded at the University of Waterloo 2 years ago, we could not have provided strong partnerships with NPO’s without the dedication, passion, and time of our members. We’ll be spotlighting different members and teams. Some will be the returning members of Blueprint, having worked on several projects, and some will be new to the team as of a month ago, just starting their work with Blueprint.
This term, Blueprint has begun working with Best Friends, a nonprofit organization dedicated to animal welfare. Best Friends operates the nation’s largest no-kill sanctuary for homeless animals, as well as adoption, spay/neuter, and educational programs to reduce the number of animals who enter and are killed in shelters.
The Problem
Animals are overlooked when poor quality photos don’t showcase them in the best way possible. This can prevent them from being adopted.
Project Vision
Our vision is to create a mobile photo-taking application to help animal shelter staff take better photos of their animals increasing the likelihood of their adoption through the use of machine learning. We chose to build our application using React Native; one codebase can be compiled into both iOS and Android.
When a photo of the animal is taken on the application, tips and suggestions are made to the user on how to improve the overall quality of the photo in order to satisfy the following 3 criteria:
Face is in focus.
Face is at the centre of the frame.
Good lighting.
Next Steps
Our team’s next steps are to further our UI design implementation, and create a Machine-Learning back-end system to indicate whether each of the criteria is satisfied.
