Recognition and Representation of Image Sketches

摘要

This invention implements a system for automatic recognition of human-assisted drawings, in a plurality of forms, be they hand-drawn on paper, marker board, with a stylus on a computer, made with a mouse, stylus, finger or other instrument on a personal computer, tablet computer, smart telephone or other medium. At the core of the invention is a pattern recognition engine, aimed at recognizing the graphical objects, handwritten text, equations or interconnects in the input image, and interpreting the significance of their relative association. The apparatus offers error correction, vector representation of the input sketch, as intermediate output, along with the recognized patterns, arranged in a hierarchical data structure, ready to be passed on for mining or assessment. The recognized patterns can be associated with mechanical design, electrical circuit design, mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry, computer science, natural sciences, medicine, or any other science- or engineering-based discipline making use of human-assisted drawings.

主权项

1. An apparatus for recognizing and interpreting content in a human-drawn sketch, and for offering a vector representation of the sketch, the apparatus comprising:
a graphical user interface, configured to accept the user input (both the sketch and the configuration settings); a recognition engine, configured to extract the patterns of choice from the sketch and return to the image logic through a standardized API in the form of a master entity with a hierarchical structure; an image logic (database abstraction) module, configured to return the recognized vector objects to the GUI for display, store the recognized vector entities in a database, support querying of the state of each vector entity and pass all such entities to the vector graphics generator; a vector graphics generator, configured to accept the vector entities from the image logic and generate a vector representation of the input sketch (an intermediate output); a database system (or its proxy), configured to store the recognized vector entities along with dictionaries capturing the categories of valid graphical symbols and words (specific to the language selected); error correction functionality, wherein the recognized objects are propagated from the recognition engine back to the GUI for visualization, user acceptance or modification; and play-back mechanism, enabled by substituting the user input with a pre-recorded log file storing the user's past actions.