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+# Miscellaneous Perception Experiments
+
+This directory contains older exploratory scripts, notebooks, calibration utilities, and experimental image-processing code that has not been promoted into a task-specific package.
+
+## Current Contents
+
+- `dark_channel/`: dark-channel dehazing and depth-map experiments used by background-removal exploration.
+- `combined_filter.py` and `combinedFilTest.py`: earlier combined-filter experiments. Active task code currently uses `perception.tasks.segmentation.combinedFilter`.
+- `camera_chessboard_calibration.py`: camera calibration utility.
+- `optical_flow.py`, `featureGray2_higher_order_fns.py`, and notebooks: exploratory perception prototypes.
+- `DiceLabels.csv`: label data for older dice detection experiments.
+
+## Guidelines
+
+- New production task code should live under `perception/tasks/<task>/`.
+- Shared reusable image-processing code should live under `perception/tasks/segmentation/` or another task-owned module with tests.
+- Keep notebooks and one-off experiments here only when they are still useful reference material.
+- If a misc script becomes part of a task workflow, move it into that task package and update imports/tests in the same change.
+
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+# Third-party Code
+
+This directory is for vendored external code that is used by perception tasks but is not maintained as first-party project code.
+
+## Current Contents
+
+- `sort/`: vendored SORT multi-object tracker implementation, including its upstream README, license, requirements, and sample MOT data.
+
+## Guidelines
+
+- Keep each dependency in its own subdirectory.
+- Preserve upstream license files and README files.
+- Avoid editing vendored code unless the local change is documented.
+- Prefer adding a short note here when a new third-party dependency is added, including why it is vendored instead of installed from package metadata.
+- Keep large generated outputs and local datasets out of this directory.
+