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futurity_sci_tech 01007.txt

#iphone artists help solve#fat finger#problem CARNEGIE MELLON (US) Using the data amassed with an iphone drawing game, researchers have built a tool that improves touchscreen art. The fingers of thousands of people who created sketches of Brad pitt and Angelina jolie on their iphones can collectively guide and correct the drawing strokes of subsequent touchscreen users in an application created by researchers at Carnegie mellon University and Microsoft Research. The app compensates for the at fingerproblem associated with touchscreens, automatically correcting a person drawing strokes while preserving the user artistic style. ur goal was to make it invisible to the user, so people wouldn even be aware the correction is taking place, says Alex Limpaecher, a Ph d. student in Carnegie mellon University computer science department. Adrien Treuille, associate professor of computer science and robotics, says the drawing assistance app is just one example of how Big data can be used to enhance drawing and writing on touchscreens and even provide deep insights into art and perception. The trick has been to create drawing databases large enough to leveragen obstacle that he and his research team surmounted with an iphone drawing game. The game they created, Drawafriend motivated thousands of people to sketch Brad pitt, Angelina jolie, and other celebrities. In its first week, the game generated 1, 500 images a day. The game is still operational and the resulting database now includes more than 17,000 images, each with stroke-by-stroke information about how it was created. e are in the middle of a Big data revolution, Treuille says. ee found that Big data can be used to do amazing things. But success is not inevitable; you have to have the dataset first. With Drawafriend, wee found a way to use crowdsourcing to create this critical resource for a data-impoverished phenomenon. Real-time correction In Drawafriend, players take turns drawing faces of celebrities or of mutual friends from Facebook. One player draws the face, tracing over a photo. As the portrait comes together, stroke by stroke, the other player guesses which letters are in the name of the subject of the portrait, much like in the game Hangman. Limpaecher said the game accomplishes a number of objectives. Not only does it create a large database of drawing strokes the game motivates players to try to draw as best they can and also evaluates the quality of the drawing by tracking the success of the other playersguesses. The team used the database of celebrity photos to create a simple stroke-correction method. By determining the consensus of the strokes from the database drawings, they found that they could cancel out the oisecaused by large fingers trying to draw on small screens. This correction occurs in real-time so the person is not aware that the drawing is being cleaned up even as it is being created. Freehand too? Related Articles On Futurity robot eyes 525 Carnegie mellon University How to turn robots into social butterflies blurry man in art museum Michigan State university Men focus more on'brand 'when judging art health-care-cartoons 525 University of Rochester Cartoons depict 100 years of health care debate Other applications abound. For instance, Limpaecher says algorithms have previously been created for identifying whether a person is drawing a face, or a human figure, or other subject, but large databases have not been available to enable their use. Likewise, the correction function now used for sketches based on photos could be modified for freehand drawing. To broaden the database the game could be modified to include drawings other than portrait sketches. Treuille says databases of drawings also could be used to address more basic questions. Drawings often differ substantially in appearance from their real-life subjects, he notes, which suggests that databases of drawings could be mined for insights into human perception. Such findings, in turn, might help in developing better object recognition or scene analysis for computer vision systems. The databases also might be used to create teaching tools to improve the artistic techniques of students, he adds. Limpaecher presented the findings at SIGGRAPH 2013 the International Conference on Computer graphics and Interactive Techniques, in Anaheim, California. In addition to Treuille, the other team members were Nicholas Feltman, a Ph d. student in computer science, and Michael Cohen, principal researcher in Microsoft Research Interactive Visual Media Group. The National Science Foundation, Google, Qualcomm, Adobe, Intel, and the Okawa Foundation supported the research a

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