Okay, so I was messing around with this idea of making a program to recognize all the flags used in NASCAR. You know, those colorful flags they wave around during the races. I thought it would be a fun little project, and maybe useful too. So, where did I start? Well, first I needed to know what all those flags looked like and what they meant.
I hit up the internet, searching for images of each NASCAR flag. I found that there are eight main flags: green, yellow, red, white, black, blue with a diagonal yellow stripe, black with a white cross, and checkered. I saved a bunch of pictures of each one, making sure I had different angles and lighting conditions. That way, my program would be better at recognizing them in real-life situations, not just perfect pictures.
Next, I needed a way to get these images into my computer in a format it could understand. For this, I used some software that let me take screenshots on my computer. Then I needed to label them. It was pretty boring, but I had to go through each image, identifying the flag, and saving them into their correct folders. This was my training dataset – the pictures my computer will study to learn about flags.
After that I started to build the program itself. I decided to use Python, ’cause it’s pretty straightforward for this kind of thing, and it has these libraries called OpenCV and Keras that are great for image recognition. I wrote some code to load up my labeled images, then used Keras to create a “convolutional neural network.” I’m not gonna go into the technical stuff here, but it’s basically a type of program that’s really good at learning from images.
I trained the network on my dataset, which basically meant showing it all those flag pictures over and over until it started to get the hang of it. This took a while, and I had to adjust some settings to improve accuracy. At first, it would confuse the yellow and white flags. After some tweaking, it finally started to recognize all the flags with good accuracy. I have to say I felt a sense of accomplishment at this point.
The final step was to test it out with some real NASCAR footage. I found a video online, paused it at different points where flags were being waved, and ran my program to see if it could identify them correctly. And guess what? It worked! It wasn’t perfect, and sometimes it took a few seconds to figure it out, but it correctly identified most of the flags. There were a few that confused it, like the blue flag with the yellow stripe, but overall I was pretty happy with how it turned out.
So there you have it. That’s how I went about making a program to recognize NASCAR flags. It was a fun project, and I learned a lot along the way. Maybe it’s not something that’s gonna change the world, but it was a good way to practice my coding skills and learn more about image recognition. Plus, now I can watch a NASCAR race and have my computer tell me what all those flags mean!
