Reading 24

Reading 24: SketchREADPaperAlvarado, Christine, and Randall Davis. "SketchREAD: a multi-domain sketch recognition engine." Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology. ACM, 2004.Publication Link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1029637

Summary:This paper aims at recognizing freely hand drawn diagram sketches. It uses a hierarchical shape description language to describe shapes in a domain. Definition of a shape has its sub-shapes and constraints. From the description of a shape and domain pattern, a Bayesian network is constructed to indicate causal relationships. While sketch recognition, an interpretation network is also generated. Hypothesis generation has 3 steps:1) Bottom up: As user draws, system parses the strokes into primitives using domain independent recognition toolkit.2) Top down: System re-interprets the strokes and attempts to find missing sub-shapes from partial interpretations3) Pruning: System removes unlikely interpretations

Discussion:It gives examples of a really complicated domain, like physics. This seems really challenging and exciting at the same time. Also the fact that it is multi-domain is really impressive. As it performs stoke parsing while user is drawing, it seems pretty effective