The students have developed an inexpensive, portable and real-time air quality analytics application.
A team of Delhi-based engineering college students has won a competition by US' prestigious Marconi Society for developing an innovative mobile application that estimates the quality of air in one's neighbourhood by analysing the images taken by a smartphone camera.
The team, which won $1,500 for their solution, developed an inexpensive, portable and real-time air quality analytics application: Air Cognizer. In this, a user uploads an image taken outdoors with half of the image covering the sky region
The application developed by Tanmay Srivastava, Kanishk Jeet and Prerna Khanna of Bharati Vidyapeeth's College of Engineering won the top spot in the contest organised in India under the Celestini Program, supported by the Marconi Society, according to an official release issued by the Mountain View, California-based Marconi Society.
The Celestini Program, named for the hill in Italy where Guglielmo Marconi conducted his first wireless transmission experiments, is run by winners of the Society's annual Young Scholar Awards, who work with technical undergraduate students in developing countries, to use technology to create social and economic transformation in their communities, it said.
"Using image processing techniques, features are extracted and the machine learning model estimates the Air Quality Index (AQI) levels for theuser's location. The machine learning model is deployed on smartphonesusing Tensorflow Lite and Machine Learning (ML) Kit from Google," the release said.
An Android app of the same name is available at Google Play.
"Air Cognizer is simple to use and free -- and will prove to be very useful for citizens in cities like Delhi, where air pollution is particularly acute now," the Marconi Society said.
In India, the Celestini Program was started in 2017 in partnership with IIT-Delhi by Aakanksha Chowdhery, an ML Engineer with Google AI, who was selected as a Marconi Young Scholar in 2012 for her work in high-speed last-mile internet connectivity.