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Joseph Jessie Oñate
Joseph Jessie Oñate

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How I came up and developed BizSpot?

The most difficult thing in developing an app is to think about the app itself, what should be its concept and even its functionalities.

What to do?

In Graduate School Computer Vision course, we are tasked to develop a computer vision app and write a corresponding research paper of it. Well, I'm so excited at first cause it's the time to think freely and out of the box. But I was wrong, cause it took me months to think about what app I supposed to develop.

Not until one day in the middle of this COVID-19 pandemic, it just came into my mind, what if I create an app wherein it will check if a certain location is viable to be a business location. So, I checked the Google Satellite Map and scan some of the places. One unique thing that I've noticed is that when a specific place has no houses, it only shows greeny pixels but if there's so many houses, it will certainly show you a pixels of roof or building deck.

Finding solutions

So what I did first was, I tried to search for possible methods to extract details from the satellite map. At first, I tried the canny edge detection using OpenCV-python. However, I did not get my desired result cause there's some circumstances and objects affecting the detection. I scanned my digital image processing repository and I've found and recalled the Intensity Level Slicing idea. Apparently, Intensity Level Slicing is mostly used for enhancing features in satellite images and that was it, that was the key.

GitHub logo iamjcoo / Digital-Image-Processing

MSCS Digital Image Processing Codes using Python OpenCV

Coding time

After testing the code, I've decided that I will use Flask, a python microframework to develop the app. I first create the blade templates by using HTML and CSS Framework. I chose NES.css as my style cause it's kinda cute to me.

GitHub logo nostalgic-css / NES.css

NES-style CSS Framework | ファミコン風CSSフレームワーク

Next, I wrote the routes, I have only two routes, the index route, and the analyze route. Index route is responsible for returning the index blade while the Analyze route is for the analysis of the satellite map image. Here's the full repository of BizSpot for your code reference.

GitHub logo iamjcoo / BizSpot

BizSpot: Business Spot Analyzer is a system that analyzes satellite imagery and detects its business viability

Deploy

Now, it's time to share this with people. I've planned to deploy this to Heroku since it's easy and free to deploy an app there and they support all kinds of environments such as python and everything.

You can freely use and viewBizSpot via this link https://bizspot.herokuapp.com

Summary

The big thing here is don't lose your hope cause there are so many solutions out there. Just always think that you will do it right in time. Don't be scared to ask and search for stuff and ideas. If you want to build something useful and big, start it with yourself. Think, venture, and explore new things that could make your experience easier.

Now, show them everything, your ideas, your talent. Don't hide away, come out and build!

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