Polanding Twitter Bot

This was a project I worked on with my friend Nadia for our final project in Deep Learning for Computer Vision. We utilized the Tweepy Twitter API and TensorFlow Object Detection to make a Twitter bot that could locate a red-white boundary like that in the Polish flag. The project writeup can be seen below ☺️

What is ‘polanding’?

According to Urban Dictionary, it’s the process of “looking for the Poland flag in everyday things around you.”

Watch this TikTok video for more info.

Here’s a link to our presentation and a link to the Twitter bot.

Project Objectives

This project was inspired by the TikTok trend known as ‘polanding.’ In a TikTok video, a user will record themselves finding a Polish flag (a rectangle with the top half white and the bottom half red) in everday life, whether out on a walk, in a city, or in their immediate surroundings. The main objective of this project is to identify an instance of the Polish flag in any given image through a series of rotations and/or transformations. We aim to train an image classifier on a bundle of images and use it in turn for image classification on any image the user might feed it. The network will be able to distinguish between red and white and pick out when a border between the two is noticed. Ideally, our classifier will be able to take in any given image and pinpoint a rectangle in the image that looks like the Polish flag, also reporting the percent confidence in its selection.

Methods

Data Collection

First, we collected 208 images from Google Images that we could visibly pick out an instance of the Polish flag in, with varying levels of difficulty. Many images were those of simple objects, like stop signs or red/white awnings, and others were images crowded with many things, like a photo of Times Square. We used LabelMe, an online annotation tool, to manually outline instances of the Polish flag as seen from our own eyes. Once we found an instance of the Polish flag, we assigned it one of the four following labels (the ‘poland-red’ prefix indicates where the red in the rectangle is):

1. poland-red-right
2. poland-red-left
3. poland-red-up
4. poland-red-down