SHE HAS A VISION— Medea Creek student Shruti Aggarwal will showcase her science project at the national science fair in Washington, D.C. The project, which explores visual recognition, also earned an award from the UCLA Brain Institute. Shruti Aggarwal, an eighthgrade student at Medea Creek Middle School in Oak Park, will compete in the Broadcom Masters national science fair in Washington, D.C., in October.

Shruti qualified for the honor after winning second place in the state competition at the California Science Center on May 3, following a first-place win at the Ventura County Science Fair on April 30.

Ordinarily, only first-place winners at the state competition move on to the nationals, but Shruti’s project was so compelling that she was nominated by judges to enter the final round of the contest.

The idea for her science project came to Shruti in her history class. Students were challenged to connect a historical event with a current issue. Shruti couldn’t help but think of how many young men and women had been killed by friendly fire in the war in Afghanistan.

“We were firing at a lot of the wrong people,” Shruti said. “With technology today it could be improved upon and this could be stopped.”

Shruti’s project, “Is it a Match? Image Resolution and Its Impact on Face Resolution,” explores how humans recognize images from a surveillance camera. She experimented with various elements of the face to determine which features contributed most to recognition.

For instance, is facial recognition based on internal features—a person’s eyes, nose and mouth— or external features—the jaw line, ear shape and hair?

Starting in January, Shruti began testing face recognition with groups of students and adults. She showed students 10 photos of celebrities that were sharply focused and then showed the students the same photos that had been blurred and distorted with a photo manipulation computer program.

The idea was to determine how humans recognize images on surveillance cameras and the role of various components of the face in that recognition.

“I realized that the kids at the highest blurred level were getting 79 percent, which was very good for them,” Shruti said. Internal and external were equally important.

Why, then, weren’t people getting the same results on surveillance cameras and other automatic recognition devises?

Shruti deduced that the companies building devices that capture video or photo images were testing their products with sharp images only. Without tests on blurred images, manufacturers of photo recognition programs would have difficulty knowing the effectiveness of their product, she said.

“You end up having blurry images because they’re not being tested correctly,” Shruti said. “I would say that if I had the mathematical technology, and understood advanced math concepts, I’d get that done. In reality, a video on TV is always very blurry.”

Her project earned Shruti $500 and a first-place award in the junior special awards category from the UCLA Brain Institute.

Shruti has had an affinity for science for many years. She won first place in the Ventura County Science Fair in seventh grade and came home with a fifth-place ribbon for the state competition. In that contest, she examined whether eye charts would test vision more accurately using symbols rather than letters.

Science is not Shruti’s only passion. She plays the piano and volleyball, is skilled at chess and is a member of the school’s environmental club.

“We are very proud of Shruti,” said Medea Creek eighthgrade science teacher Marianne Seaborne. “ Shruti is a very mature, self- directed young woman. She did this project on her very own.”

Cindy Ligeti, Shruti’s seventhgrade teacher and mentor with Seaborne this year, called her student “amazing, intelligent and gifted.”

“She has been involved in everything science at Medea Creek for the past three years, and to watch her grow has been rewarding as a teacher,” Ligeti said. “Shruti is one of Oak Park Unified School District’s very finest, and we all wish her the best at nationals.

Shruti’s parents are equally thrilled at their daughter’s latest accomplishment.

“We’ve been amazed at her dedication to continue this process,” said Ragini Aggarwal, Shruti’s mother. “We’re very proud of her.”