Bahira Akramy thinks outside the box

Bahira Akramy is a Verrazano graduate, Class of 2019, earned a degree in Electrical Engineering

Being a fourth year Verrazano student majoring in Electrical Engineering student proved to be difficult in the beginning. On top of juggling an internship, school work, and a required senior design project, I needed to decide what I wanted to my capstone project to be on. At first, I was dreading it because I just didn’t have the time to even think about what I wanted to do, and I felt overwhelmed. For my senior design project, I had already decided on a project that was in the field I was interested in so I was really just confused on what I should do. 

However, after taking a few deep breaths, a few naps and doing a lot of running around, I realized that I could take my capstone in a totally different direction that my senior design project was going in.  I realized that there is so much to explore in the field of Electrical Engineering, and I wanted my Capstone project to reflect a different topic that I would normally never even think about. 

Bahira in lab

For my capstone I chose to research how removing the Bayer interpolation in a camera can increases the rate that data on an LED Array can be captured from a camera. Bayer interpolation is a process that takes place in all commercial cameras that results in two-thirds of pixel data being lost to the estimation of the location of the pixels.  In order to complete this, I needed to first create a software receiver that could process an image that was not Bayer interpolated. 
Learning new things was something that happened frequently during the completion of my capstone. Not only did I learn about image processing, cameras, programming etc. but I developed skills that can’t be taught. I learned how to properly debug a program, how to think critically and most important how to explore of multiple solutions. Most of the time when I was programming in the lab the first solution to a problem did not work and an  alternate approach needed to be taken. This capstone helped me develop my problem-solving abilities, which is an important skill needed for an Engineer.   Engineers are confronted with problems everyday and in order to solve a problem sometimes an alternate approach needs to be taken.  I can now transfer these skills I developed to real life problems I will be facing as an electrical engineer.