Researchers Develop Computer Program That Can Identify Sketches

Posted on September 13, 2012

Researchers from Brown University and the Technical University of Berlin have developed an interactive sketch recognition engine (computer program) that can identify abstract sketches. The researchers say their program correctly identifies simple abstract sketches of objects 56% of time compared to human viewers, who are right 73% of the time.

The sketches above are drawings of rabbits. Human sketches of rabbits have common features like big ears, buckteeth, whiskers and a cotton tail. James Hays, assistant professor of computer science at Brown, who developed the new program with Mathias Eitz and Marc Alexa from the Technical University in Berlin, said in a release, "It might be that we only recognize it as a rabbit because we all grew up that way, Whoever got the ball rolling on caricaturing rabbits like that, that's just how we all draw them now."

The research behind the program was presented last month at SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics conference. You can find the presentation online here. Take a look:


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