July 22, 2013

Carnegie Mellon, Microsoft Scientists Use Mobile Games To Generate Database for Large-scale Analysis of Human Drawing



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 "fat finger" problem associated with touchscreens, automatically correcting a person's drawing strokes while preserving the user's artistic style. "Our goal was to make it invisible to the user, so people wouldn't even be aware the correction is taking place," said Alex Limpaecher, a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department.