With the rapid increase of technological capabilities, particularly in processing power and speed, the usage of machine learning is becoming increasingly widespread, especially in fields where real-time assessment of complex data is extremely valuable. This surge in popularity of machine learning gives rise to an abundance of potential research and projects on further broadening applications of artificial intelligence. From these opportunities comes the purpose of this thesis. Our work seeks to meaningfully increase our understanding of current capabilities of machine learning and the problems they can solve. One extremely popular application of machine learning is in data prediction, as machines are capable of finding trends that humans often miss. Our effort to this end was to examine the CVE dataset and attempt to predict future entries with Random Forests. The second area of interest lies within the great promise being demonstrated by neural networks in the field of autonomous driving. We sought to understand the research being put out by the most prominent bodies within this field and to implement a model on one of the largest standing datasets, Berkeley DeepDrive 100k. This thesis describes our efforts to build, train, and optimize a Random Forest model on the CVE dataset and a convolutional neural network on the Berkeley DeepDrive 100k dataset. We document these efforts with the goal of growing our knowledge on (and usage of) machine learning in these topics.

Recent advancements in machine learning methods have allowed companies to develop advanced computer vision aided production lines that take advantage of the raw and labeled data captured by high-definition cameras mounted at vantage points in their factory floor. We experiment with two different methods of developing one such system to automatically track key components on a production line. By tracking the state of these key components using object detection we can accurately determine and report production line metrics like part arrival and start/stop times for key factory processes. We began by collecting and labeling raw image data from the cameras overlooking the factory floor. Using that data we trained two dedicated object detection models. Our training utilized transfer learning to start from a Faster R-CNN ResNet model trained on Microsoft’s COCO dataset. The first model we developed is a binary classifier that detects the state of a single object while the second model is a multiclass classifier that detects the state of two distinct objects on the factory floor. Both models achieved over 95% classification and localization accuracy on our test datasets. Having two additional classes did not affect the classification or localization accuracy of the multiclass model compared to the binary model.