Course Project

Overview

The Course Project is an opportunity for you to apply what you have learned in class to a problem of your interest. Potential projects usually fall into these two tracks:

One restriction to note is that this is a Computer Vision class, so your project should involve pixels of visual data in some form somewhere. E.g. a pure NLP project is not a good choice, even if your approach involves ConvNets.

To get a better feeling for what we expect from CS231n projects, we encourage you to take a look at the project reports from previous years:

To inspire ideas, you might also look at recent deep learning publications from top-tier conferences, as well as other resources below.

For applications, this type of projects would involve careful data preparation, an appropriate loss function, details of training and cross-validation and good test set evaluations and model comparisons. Don't be afraid to think outside of the box. Some successful examples can be found below:

ConvNets also run in real time on mobile phones and Raspberry Pi's - building an interesting mobile application could be a good project. If you want to go this route you might want to check out TensorFlow Mobile / Lite or Caffe2 iOS/Android integration.

For models, ConvNets have been successfully used in a variety of computer vision tasks. This type of projects would involve understanding the state-of-the-art vision models, and building new models or improving existing models for a vision task. The list below presents some papers on recent advances of ConvNets in the computer vision community.

You might also gain inspiration by taking a look at some popular computer vision datasets:

Collaboration Policy

You can work in teams of up to 3 people. We do expect that projects done with 3 people have more impressive writeup and results than projects done with 2 people. To get a sense for the scope and expectations for 2-people projects have a look at project reports from previous years.

Honor Code

You may consult any papers, books, online references, or publicly available implementations for ideas and code that you may want to incorporate into your strategy or algorithm, so long as you clearly cite your sources in your code and your writeup. However, under no circumstances may you look at another group’s code or incorporate their code into your project.

If you are combining your course project with the project from another class, you must receive permission from the instructors, and clearly explain in the Proposal, Milestone, and Final Report the exact portion of the project that is being counted for CS 231n. In this case you must prepare separate reports for each course, and submit your final report for the other course as well.

Important Dates

Unless otherwise noted, all project items are due by 11:59 pm Pacific Time.

Project Proposal

The project proposal should be one paragraph (200-400 words). Your project proposal should describe:

Submission: Please submit your proposal as a PDF on Gradescope. Only one person on your team should submit. Please have this person add the rest of your team as collaborators as a "Group Submission".

Project Milestone

Fine-grained requirements are listed on Piazza. Your project milestone report should be between 2 - 3 pages using the provided template. The following is a suggested structure for your report:

Submission: Please submit your milestone as a PDF on Gradescope. Only one person on your team should submit. Please have this person add the rest of your team as collaborators as a "Group Submission".

Final Report

Your final write-up is required to be between 6 - 8 pages using the provided template, structured like a paper from a computer vision conference (CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, etc.). Please use this template so we can fairly judge all student projects without worrying about altered font sizes, margins, etc. After the class, we will post all the final reports online so that you can read about each others' work. If you do not want your writeup to be posted online, then please let us know via the project registration form.

The following is a suggested structure for your report, as well as the rubric that we will follow when evaluating reports. You don't necessarily have to organize your report using these sections in this order, but that would likely be a good starting point for most projects.
Refer to [Piazza] for more fine-grained details and explanations of each separate section.

Submission: You will submit your final report as a PDF and your supplementary material as a separate PDF or ZIP file. We will provide detailed submission instructions as the deadline nears.

Additional Submission Requirements: We will also ask you do do the following when you submit your project report:

In summary, include all contributing authors in your PDF; include detailed non-231N co-author information; tell us if you submitted to a conference, cite any code you used, and submit your dual-project report (e.g., CS 230, CS 231A, CS 234).

Project Presentation (video recording)

We will not hold a poster session this quarter. Instead we will use video recording as the way for student to present and share their project. Each group is required to submit a 5-minute presentation video for their final project. Students can be as creative as they like for their video presentations. The easiest option is to create a slide deck together as a team and record yourselves presenting the slide deck as a group using zoom. Each student member should speaker during the presentation.

The following is a suggested structure for the video presentation. The specific rubric will be updated later in the quarter. You don't necessarily have to organize your presentation using these sections in this order, but that would likely be a good starting point for most projects.