ICanDraw: using sketch recognition and corrective feedback to assist a user in drawing human faces (Paper Report)

Bibliography:

Daniel Dixon, Manoj Prasad, and Tracy Hammond. 2010. iCanDraw: using sketch recognition and corrective feedback to assist a user in drawing human faces. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 897-906. DOI=10.1145/1753326.1753459

Link: 

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1753459

Summary:

In this paper, the author presents a system to assist in the act of drawing the human face, a very difficult skill to master. The user is given a photo portrait and is asked to follow a set of steps to complete a drawing of the given face. At each step the system seeks to assist the user in placing the salient features that make up the face. The features to be drawn at each step are focused by dimming the rest of the face. User feedback is given in the form of text feedback that points out errors such as an eye being too small as well as visual feedback that highlights where contours should go or which strokes appear misplaced. A template of the desired face is made by first analyzing the photo portrait with facial recognition algorithms to produce a set of features that define a face. A contour drawing of the points is used to judge the correctness of the strokes the user makes as well as determining the effectiveness of the system by comparing the users processed drawing, thorough the facial recognition system, to the desired drawing.

Comments:

I feel that the intention of the system is in the right direction but some of the methods are more mechanical than I would prefer. There are other aspects of drawing that I feel would be helpful. One thing I would have liked to see addressed is the fear of starting the drawing in the first place. Staring at a blank page is frightening to novice and master alike. Somehow facilitating the first and subsequent marks, I feel, would aid in the process of drawing the face. Also I would like to incorporate defocus attention on the drawing action and more on the 'seeing/drawing' connect.

Ideas for Research:

I think that approach to making marks for facial features would be to turn it into a game where the goal is to slice object down the middle. The slices would then 'draw' out the face. This abstracts the drawing act enough that the users own perceptions of how a face looks doesn't get in the way.