The Senior Capstone Project by Andrew Han, Rosendo Narvaez, Hoa Nguyen, Faith Mitchell, and Taylor Wilson titled “Walmart Anonymization Pipeline” recently won first place in the Computer Science and Engineering category at the Texas A&M University’s Engineering Project Showcase held at the Zachry Engineering Education Complex on Friday, April 29, 2022.
Dr. Tracy Hammond, Director of IEEI and professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, at Texas A&M University , teaches their senior capstone class.
The students created software that anonymizes subjects in surveillance footage on behalf of Walmart. Companies are not authorized to view surveillance footage unless needed for security reasons, limiting marketing researchers’ data access.
The software was evaluated based on whether it can fully anonymize subjects in a video file and whether the subjects can still be identified as humans using object detection. They said, “While Walmart is our current target audience for this project, we are confident that this research will apply to many other computer vision projects.”
Organized by Texas A&M Engineering, the Engineering Project Showcase is an annual celebration of the technical accomplishments of engineering undergraduates. Nearly 1,200 engineering students representing over 240 engineering capstone teams from all engineering departments participated and presented their team projects through posters and prototypes.
This year’s showcase took place at the Zachry Engineering Education Complex at Texas A&M University and was spread out over four floors of the state-of-the-art building.
In this diverse showcase, students had the chance to network with industry professionals, showcase their projects, and address solutions to practical problems faced in the industry.
Project sponsors included BP, Caterpillar, Halliburton, American Airlines, and Walmart.