With air quality still bad, after Diwali, in Delhi and other North Indian cities, citizens are anxious to know the air quality index or AQI in their neighbourhood. They like to check if it has crossed the danger levels flashed daily on TV.
An Android app named Air Cognizer, developed by a trio of students from Bharti Vidyapeeth College of Engineering, Delhi and available as a free download, might come in handy.
The user needs to snap a photo with the smartphone and upload an image taken outdoors, with half of the image covering the sky region. Using AI and image processing techniques, the app extracts features from this image and correlates it with information provided by the local weather office to the computer the AQI.
The solution won the top prize recently, for the three students — Tanmay Srivastava, Kanishk Jeet and Prerna Khanna — in a contest organised in India by the Celestini Programme, an educational outreach of the US-based Marconi Society.
Currently, the tool works in the National Capital Region, but the developers hope to link it to the weather data of other Indian cities where the air is bad.
