Term Project

The term project is a chance to further explore a topic of interest with application to a specific engineering problem. Groups of up to three students are encouraged. The projects consist of the following components:

  1. Problem component: Formulate a goal and identify a specific building, civil infrastructure, construction or monitoring problem;
  2. Technical component: Devise an approach to address the goal with visual sensing and semantic analysis techniques;
  3. Application component: Develop reconstruction, recognition, identification and/or detection models and evaluate them for the specific problem identified using an experimental or a real-world case study.

Term Project Report Format

The following is the guideline for term project report format:

  • Term project report should not exceed 10 pages.
  • Every project will start with the title of the project and authors.
  • Project Abstract: short summary of the project with main results.
  • The term project report will include the following distinct sections:
  1. Introduction: introduce the problem you want to solve, explain the significance of the problem why it is important to solve it); and indicate the method you used to solve it. It is also highly recommended to add a concept figure showing the overall idea behind the method you are presenting.
  2. Review of previous works: (i.e. previous methods that have explored a similar problem)
  3. Key contributions of your work: Why your method is better than previous work. Summarize the key main contributions of your work;
  4. Technical part: Summary of the technical solution
  5. Technical part: Details of the technical solution; you may want to decompose this section into several subsections; add figures to help your explanation.
  6. Experiments: present here experimental results of the method you have implemented with plots, graphs, images and visualizations.
  7. Conclusions: what's the take home message?
  8. References

Term Project Evaluation

Term project report will be evaluated based on the quality of the writing, the clarity of your technical explanation and, overall, how well you get your message across.


Term Project Source Code

Term project source codes of your working program need to be submitted to the  course website. This file is due on the project submission deadline date.


Term Project Presentation in Class

The presentation must be 20 minutes long; if you have a 3-person team, then each of you will present for 7 minutes. There will be 2-5 minutes for questions after the presentation. If your presentation lasts more than 20 minutes, it will be stopped. So please make sure the presentation does not go over 20 minutes.

Term Project Presentation Format

The idea is to turn your project report into slides; thus, your presentation will need to include slides covering:

  1. Introduction: introduce the problem you want to solve, explain why it is important to solve it; and indicate the method you used to solve it.
  2. Review of previous work (i.e. previous methods that have explored a similar problem)
  • Why your method is better than previous work; and/or explain the key main contributions of your work;
  • Technical part: Summary of the technical solution, followed by the details of the technical solution;
  • Experiments: present here experimental results of the method you have implemented with plots, graphs, images and visualizations.

  3. Conclusions: what's the take home message?


Term Project Presentation Evaluations

Your presentation will be evaluated based on its clarity, quality of the slides, how well you get your message across, and how well you handle the questions at the end. Note that the presentation can still contain ongoing (non-final) results; final results may be included in the final report.


Term Project Progress Report Format (PDF format)

The following is the guideline for term project progress report format:

  • Project progress report should not exceed 4 pages.
  • Every project will start with the title of the project and authors.

The project progress report will include five distinct sections:

  1. Introduction: introduce the problem you want to solve, explain the significance of the problem why it is important to solve it); and indicate the method you used to solve it. It is also highly recommended to add a concept figure showing the overall idea behind the method you are presenting.
  2. Technical Part: How do you propose to solve it?
  3. Achieved Project Milestones: Milestones achieved so far
  4. Remaining Project Milestones: Dates and sub-goals
  5. References.

Term Project Proposal Format (PDF format)

The following is the guideline for term project proposal format:

  • Project proposal should not exceed 2 pages.
  • Every project will start with the title of the project and authors.
  • The project progress report will include four distinct sections:
  1. Introduction: introduce the problem you want to solve, explain the significance of the problem why it is important to solve it); and indicate the method you used to solve it. It is also highly recommended to add a concept figure showing the overall idea behind the method you are presenting.
  2. Technical Part: How do you propose to solve it?
  3. Project Milestones: Dates and sub-goals
  4. References.