Randall DavisSummary
This paper presents an overview of the field of sketch understanding and more specifically a sketch understanding system called Magic Paper. It points out reasons for developing systems that understand free hand sketches. A number of problems with sketch understanding are described. Solutions from other areas such as speech recognition are pointed out and explained why they are not suitable for sketch recognition. The basics of sketch understanding are presented including sketch representation, finding primitives, and recognizing shapes. A number of sketch-enabled interfaces are described where sketch understanding is connected to a back-end system such as RationalRose or ChemDraw. Techniques for automated learning of new sketch domains and the difficulties associated with this task are presented.
Discussion
This paper presents a nice overview of the issues of sketch understanding, and why solving these issues is so challenging. The goal of this work is to create "magic paper" which affords the same natural and easy interaction as paper, but is capable of understanding what is drawn on the paper. It would seem advances in both hardware technology and software algorithms are still needed to achieve this ambition goal, but several big steps have already been taken to get us there. The concept of true "magic paper" seems the killer app for sketch understanding. Only when "magic paper" is better than or at least comparable to real paper will sketch understanding find itself deeply-seated in the daily lives of humans.
No comments:
Post a Comment