Using Computer Vision to Help Win $1 Million in Mountain Dew's Big Game Contest

During Super Bowl LV, Mountain Dew aired a commercial featuring John Cena in a Mountain Dew-themed amusement park, challenging viewers to count the exact number of bottles in the ad for a chance to win $1 million. To tackle this task, the blog describes using computer vision technology to train an object detection model capable of identifying bottles throughout the scene. The process involved creating a dataset by extracting frames from the video, annotating the bottles in each frame, and then employing image augmentation to enhance the dataset's volume and variability. The model was trained using transfer learning starting from the COCO Dataset, resulting in a model with 89.5% mean average precision. The trained model was then used to analyze the original video, providing a method to accurately count the bottles and potentially win the contest.