# AetherEdge Student Builders Program
## Vehicle Counting and Flow Analysis Challenge

This dataset package contains the materials for the AetherEdge Student Builders Program challenge.

## Challenge Objective
Build a computer vision solution that detects vehicles in fixed-camera video and counts vehicle crossing events using a predefined virtual line.

## What you need to build
Your solution should:

1. Detect vehicles in the video
2. Track or consistently count vehicles across frames
3. Count a vehicle when it crosses the predefined virtual line
4. Generate useful outputs such as:
   - total count
   - directional count
   - event log with timestamps
   - annotated output video
5. Provide a deployable interface such as:
   - Streamlit app
   - Gradio app
   - FastAPI endpoint
   - Dockerized app

## Important Clarification
This challenge is about **vehicle crossing events**, not real-world vehicle identity.

You do NOT need to identify the exact real-world vehicle uniquely across long time periods.

Instead, your system should count each tracked vehicle once per valid crossing event when it moves across the provided line in the required direction.

Your goal is to reduce duplicate counting during the same crossing event.

## Dataset Structure
- `dev/` contains development clips
- `eval/` contains evaluation clips
- `line_definitions.json` contains the virtual counting line coordinates for each clip
- `dataset_manifest.csv` provides clip metadata
- `sample_output_format.csv` shows an example of the expected event log format

## Rules
- Individual submission only
- Pre-trained models are allowed
- Open-source tools are allowed
- Training from scratch is NOT required
- No face recognition
- No identity matching
- Do not manually hardcode answers
- Do not redistribute this dataset
- Use the provided clips for final evaluation

## Recommended Approach
A typical solution may include:
- object detector
- tracker or object association logic
- line-crossing logic
- event logging
- simple deployable UI/API

## Submission Requirements
Please submit:
- code
- demo video
- short report
- deployable interface
- optional GitHub link
- solution ZIP

## Notes
Perfect accuracy is NOT expected.

A clear, working, well-explained solution is better than an over-complicated unfinished one.
