Final year student projects

This student project involved producing a software package that takes a picture of your face and turns it into a cartoon drawing. The system works like a human cartoonist, exaggerating the differences between the person's face that they are drawing and the average face. So for example if you have slightly larger than normal ears then a cartoonist will draw them even larger. The software also lets you turn your cartoon into a Sodaconstructor drawing. Sodaconstructor is part of the department's Sodarace project, and many students projects have been a part of Sodarace. You can try the software for yourself at Sodarace.

From Facebook to MySpace, social networking websites have become one of the most exciting aspects of Web 2.0 technology. This project involved the design and development of a social networking application for businesses and companies. Spring MVC and Spring Webflow frameworks were used to allow businesses to network with each other and advertise amongst other business solutions.

Computer technologies mean that we live in a world where much of our communication is based on written rather than spoken words; phone texts, emails and chat rooms are popular examples. If we are speaking to someone face to face their expressions and tone of voice give us clues to what they are meaning. Text can be a problem though as often the meaning of phrases can be mistaken. In this project a multiple user chat room was built from scratch, where a face represented each of the users, the expression on that face was controlled by the users which we showed experimentally this helped better communication in the chat room group.

If it were not for the bees we would be in trouble. Bees are the main way that flowers get pollinated, as the bees sup the nectar they carry pollen from flower to flower, allowing new generations of flowers to grow. But the way a flower looks to our eyes isn't the same way a bee sees it. For example, bee vision works into the ultra violet; under the correct lighting in a laboratory wonderful, normally invisible, patterns are revealed. Biologists all over the world have been collecting information about the sorts of patterns that particular flowers display. This display is called a spectral profile, and Samia Faruq has done her bit to help these scientists peer into the world of the bees. Her project involved creating a massive online database containing worldwide spectral profile information, so scientists can search this information easily. They can also combine information to help discover new facts using a method called clustering, where the computer pulls together all the data with similar properties.

In this third year project the student built a robotic face (from Lego mindstorm) capable of expressing emotion, and software that allowed the robot to responded to the tone of the user voice. In the future many more devices around the home may have the ability to recognise and respond to emotion. [Watch the video]

We can think of colour as made up of adding 'colour elements' (wavelengths). Similarly can we find the set of images to add together to make faces. Shown are these 'face elements', and in the red box a set of new faces made by mixing together the 'face elements'. Interesting fact: the face element at the top left is the "average" face from the large set of different faces used to build the system, to most people it looks particularly attractive, so do people prefer average faces?

Knowing your position within a room can require a keen sense of memory and concentration for visually impaired people. This project designed a way for visually impaired people to know their position in a room relative to a computer screen. Users wear hats with cameras so that the computer can detect whether the person is left, right, above or below the centre plane of the screen. One of the applications for this project was to help visually impaired people more easily navigate unfamiliar spaces.

This project involved the building of two robots who fenced with each other. One robot was controlled by a flexible exoskeleton that the student built to convert his arm movements into movements in the robot. The second robot was controlled by artificial intelligence: its skills in fencing were created by obtaining 'know how' from experts on the college Fencing team and building a set of rules for the robot to follow allowing it to react to the attacking robot in a human like way.

Many of us have used remote operated vehicles (ROVs). One of the most challenging aspects of ROVs is getting them from point A to point B without crashing into various static and moving obstacles. This project was involved in designing and building a ROV capable of automatically navigating itself to a given destination. Once the global positioning coordinates are entered into a keypad on the ROV, the robot compares its current location to its destination. From there, it navigates itself to its destination whilst avoiding any objects in its path.

In this project two robots were built from Lego Mindstorm kits and software was developed to allow the robots to communicate with one another to "play on a seesaw". (The project also involved some carpentry to build the seesaw!). The software to run on the robots was challenging, the code needs to be compact and allow the robots to react quickly. To finish it all off, the student wrote the Ringmaster program shown, which allowed him to control the robots.

The result of this project is an interactive tutor software that teaches deaf and non-deaf users Sign Language. The software, which includes games and quizzes as well as the learning sections (for beginners and advanced), is available on CD and DVD and is currently being commercialised by the company Microbooks. They believe it will do very well as it is the first interactive and substantial system aimed at children, both deaf and non deaf.

Read more about the project in issue 14 of the Quad magazine [QM website].

With increased reliance on wireless technologies, the size of antennas has been a growing concern among electronic engineers. The challenge embedded in this project was to create a small antenna capable of the same performance as much larger antennas. The end result was a powerful yet small microwave antenna that used Maxwell's Wave Equations and CAD software to simulate geometric designs.

Haider Jabbar enjoys a good puzzle, that's why he's a computer scientist. For his final year project he created a new range of soduku based puzzles for his mobile phone. Using a programming language called J2ME you can program your phone just like a desktop. The new soduku games involved creating traditional number puzzles, but also the option to make things more challenging by using letters instead or even symbols, or a mixture of all three. The system even allows you to enter a part played game to be solved step by step, a useful little cheat for the puzzle perplexed.

This project was about steganography, (the word means hidden writing). The software package developed allows the user to hide information in pictures. By understanding the way information is stored in a digital picture and also how human brains work when looking at a picture, we can find ways of hiding the extra text information in the picture so that the human observer wont notice it is there.

In this project the student developed a computer model of the human iris, that's the coloured bit in your eye. This model used an understanding of the biology actually involved in the growth of your iris and turned this medical information into a computer simulation which gives the computer generated iris its realistic appearance. Application of this method could be in computer graphics for movies, or for testing iris scan security systems.

Anyone who has ever been in the hospital knows how cumbersome and uncomfortable electrocardiogram monitors can be. With all of the wires connecting the nodes attached to the patient to the monitor, patients are limited in their movements and hospital staff need to transport the wired equipment from one patient to another. This MEng project was focused on increasing the mobility of patients and making things easier for hospital staff by designing a wireless ECG medical monitor. Wireless nodes monitoring patients' vital signs were able to transmit the information to computers, eliminating the previous constraints of wired ECG monitors.