§ 01 Problem
Detect and preprocess traffic elements under genuinely hostile conditions — variable light, motion blur, cluttered scenes — where the naive move is to throw a pretrained network at it and the constraint was to understand the image formation instead.
§ 02 Approach
- Built a modular classical pipeline where each stage is a separate, swappable file: thresholding (src/threshold.py), morphology (morph.py), noise removal (noise.py), blending (blend.py) and filtering (filter.py) — so failures could be localized to a stage instead of debugging a monolith.
- Ran the full 698-image dataset through the pipeline; its cleaned output became the input for the team's second-stage submission.
§ 03 Outcome
Advanced to stage two of the competition. The lasting value was lower-level: learning what thresholding and morphology actually do to an image before ever letting a network hide it.
§ 04 Evidence
evidenceteknofest-traffic-cv — src/, 698-image dataset



