Delhi is currently suffering from terrible pollution and smog conditions, thanks to the recent stubble burning in nearby regions.
That's why three local students wanted to make a way for residents to easily check the pollution levels in their city, to help raise awareness.
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Tanmay Srivastava, Kanishk Jeet and Prerna Khanna are all students of Bharti Vidyapeeth College of Engineering in Delhi. Together, the three of them developed an Android app to easily measure the Air Quality Index (AQI) in the National Capital Region. In response, the US-based Marconi Society has awarded the three a cash prize of ?$1,500 (approximately Rs 1,09,500) under their Celestini Programme.
"The three have developed 'Air Cognizer', a portable, real-time air quality analytics application, which is available at Google Play Store to download freely by any smartphone user to measure the air quality in his/her area," the Marconi Society said in a press release.
"The user has to upload an image taken outdoors, with half of it covering the sky region. Using image processing techniques, features are extracted and the Machine Learning (ML) model of the app estimates the AQI in the area." The machine learning at work here was adapted to smartphones using Google's Tensorflow Lite platform. The below screenshot shows Mumbai's pollution level right now.
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"You can't know how to counter an issue unless you know the severity of it," Srivastava told IANS. "Hence, we created Air Cognizer to make residents know the quality of the air they breathe, which is just a click away."
The Marconi Society focuses on the development of key technologies and their application to fixing society's problems. The Celestini Programme, which expanded to Indian in 2017, focuses on working with engineering undergraduates in developing countries to help improve the local economy and standard of living.
For this year's competition, three teams of 100 applicants were selected to work on the problem of air pollution and road safety in New Delhi.
The second prize went to Divyam Madaan and Radhika Dua, a duo from Chandigarh's University Institute of Engineering and Technology (UIET). They designed a website that forecasts air pollution in the national capital over the next 24 hours.
The third team meanwhile, Sidharth Talia, Nikunj Agarwal, and Samarjeet Kaur, was also from Bharti Vidyapeeth. They developed a digital platform for vehicles to automatically talk to each other about road safety conditions or accident scenes, using computer vision systems.