Hand Sketches Research Articles

ADAPTIVE NEURAL NETWORK FOR SKETCH BASED IMAGE RETRIEVAL

In this paper, we present neural network approach for Sketch Based Image Retrieval (SBIR) using Histogram of Gradient (HOG) feature descriptor. This paper emphasis on back propagation Feed-forward Network (FFN) and Pattern Recognition Network (PRN) used for sketch based retrieval. Neural network is a popular tool used for pattern recognition and approximation of unknown nonlinear functions. We use features descriptor like Histogram of Gradient (HOG) for free hand and human face sketches and these features are used to training of network. Experimental results and analysis are based on CHUK and Flicker dataset, used for training and testing. Different similarity measure functions are discussed and used similarity between query by non-expert sketchers and database.

Children's evaluation of a computer-based technology used as a tool to communicate their ideas for the redevelopment of their schoolyard

Abstract A surge of interest in empowering children's participation in shaping their environment has led to the development of many participation methodologies. There is, however, little evidence of research data utilizing ICT as a tool for generating children's ideas through a decision making process which results in changes to their schoolyards. This paper presents an evaluation of an adapted drawing program (Tux Paint) that is used as a research tool in a complex participatory method by gathering primary school children's perspectives on development of their schoolyard environment. These changes were to be implemented through a collaborative project with the Department of Landscape Architecture of TEIEMT and the authority of Drama city, Greece. The participating children, ages 10–12, were asked to develop a vision for their schoolyard combining hand drawing plans and sketches utilizing the adapted Tux Paint software. They were the target focus group for the evaluation of the computer program and were asked to answer questionnaires regarding software efficacy, ease, and creative potential. Moreover, they were asked whether they simply enjoyed the experience of using the software and participated in interactive group sessions to discuss the degree of their satisfaction with their computer sketches. Chi-square or Fischer's exact tests were used to analyze the data. Gender and age were defined as variables influencing the evaluation. All the participating pupils valued the Tux Paint program as easy, quick, funny and an overall creative experience.

A social network supported CAI model for tacit knowledge acquisition

Freehand sketching is one of the most important and commonly used methods of generating and sharing budding ideas during the conceptual development portion of the preliminary phase of design. To develop one’s skills, prolonged practice, acquiring instant feedback and suggestions while practicing are invaluable. The two key and indispensable parts of learning draftsmanship are viewing and commenting on large numbers of free hand sketches. However, due to insufficient educational resources, instructors must spend most of their time engaged in class-room teaching, reducing the time allotted for one-on-one discussion and specialized assistance. Furthermore, the lack of sketch grading criteria can prevent students from developing proper insights into the essentials of sketching. As a result, students neither receive personalized feedback nor acquire adequate training in critiquing freehand sketching skills. These factors decrease learning effectiveness and negatively impact learning motivation. In order to solve this problem, this research has created a discussion platform on Facebook that utilizes the learning characteristics essential to developing proficiency in freehand sketching. It includes practice, observation, and comments. It has been found that this cultivates the subjects’ ability to judge freehand sketch quality and increases learning motivation and effectiveness through the process of peer-assessment. After participating in the one-semester teaching experiment, the abilities of the experimental group were significantly better than those of the control group, demonstrating that the online sketch discussion platform has a significant impact on freehand sketch learning.

Evaluation of creative problem-solving abilities in undergraduate structural engineers through interdisciplinary problem-based learning

ABSTRACTFor a structural engineer, effective communication and interaction with architects cannot be underestimated as a key skill to success throughout their professional career. Structural engineers and architects have to share a common language and understanding of each other in order to achieve the most desirable architectural and structural designs. This interaction and engagement develops during their professional career but needs to be nurtured during their undergraduate studies. The objective of this paper is to present the strategies employed to engage higher order thinking in structural engineering students in order to help them solve complex problem-based learning (PBL) design scenarios presented by architecture students. The strategies employed were applied in the experimental setting of an undergraduate module in structural engineering at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK. The strategies employed were active learning to engage with content knowledge, the use of physical conceptual structural models to reinforce key concepts and finally, reinforcing the need for hand sketching of ideas to promote higher order problem-solving. The strategies employed were evaluated through student survey, student feedback and module facilitator (this author) reflection. The strategies were qualitatively perceived by the tutor and quantitatively evaluated by students in a cross-sectional study to help interaction with the architecture students, aid interdisciplinary learning and help students creatively solve problems (through higher order thinking). The students clearly enjoyed this module and in particular interacting with structural engineering tutors and students from another discipline.

The effects of representation on idea generation and design fixation: A study comparing sketches and function trees

Representations in engineering design can be hand sketches, photographs, CAD, functional models, physical models, or text. Using representations allows engineers to gain a clearer picture of how a design works. We present an experiment that compares the influence of representations on fixation and creativity. This experiment presents designers with an example solution represented as a function tree and a sketch, we compare how these different external representations influence design fixation as they complete a design task. Results show that function trees do not cause fixation to ideas compared to a control group, and that function trees reduce fixation when compared to sketches. Results from this experiment show that function tree representations offer advantages for reducing fixation during idea generation.

Pass the Parcel

Based in Mumbai, India, Avani Aggarwal is a digital artist whose pieces reflect a yin-and-yang style harmony of digital and nature. Her trial and error approach incorporates Photoshop, photography, hand sketches, and even fractals. The cover image for this issue, Living in Harmony, is part of Aggarwal's Cityscapes series, digital collages in which the natural world collides with the urban fabric.

Aligning shapes for symbol classification and retrieval

This paper proposes a method able to exploit peculiarities of both, local and global shape descriptors, to be employed for shape classification and retrieval. In the proposed framework, the silhouettes of symbols are firstly described through Bags of Shape Contexts. The shape signature is then used to solve the correspondence problem between points of two shapes. The obtained correspondences are employed to recover the geometric transformations between the shape to be classified/retrieved and the ones belonging to the training dataset. The alignment is based on a voting procedure in the parameter space of the model considered to recover the geometric transformation. The aligned shapes are finally described with the Blurred Shape Model descriptor for classification and retrieval purposes. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution on two classic benchmark shape datasets, as well as on a large scale set of hand sketches composed by 20,000 examples distributed over 250 object categories.

Methods for Improving Undergraduate Students' Sketching Skills

Hand sketching is one of the most important skills for design. However, many design students are not confident or competent in sketching. This paper introduces initiatives at Brunel University for improving undergraduate students' sketching skills. A range of drawing workshops were organised and their effectiveness was evaluated through students' feedback. The teaching methods and students' motivation were studied through questionnaires and focus groups. It concluded that effective methods for improving sketching skills may include a combination of: setting structured, timed tasks for daily practice; creating a relaxing peer-learning environment; incorporating sketching into each design project; and organising intensive drawing workshops to enhance learning.

Cognitive load management and architectural design outcomes

The architectural design is a process of solving multifaceted, ill-defined problems, requiring a constant dialog between internal representations (resulting of cognitive processes) and external representations based on the use of different media. This highly interactive process is very demanding on working memory and cognitive resources. In this study, we analyzed the relationship between the way in which designers manage their cognitive load during the architectural design process and the creativity of their design outcomes. We quantitatively measured cognitive load by asking 36 architecture students to perform a secondary task while using three common design media (i.e., hand sketches, physical models, and SketchUp CAD software). The students' designs were then qualitatively assessed by eight expert raters, all of them were architects (four teachers and four professionals). Results did not reveal any significant relationship between cognitive load management and design outcome creativity for any of the three design media.

Hand Sketching in 3D Computer Animation Model Rendering and Editing

With The high development of science and technology, computer hardware and auxiliary technologies have a major influence on 3D animation; As for hand-painted interactively assistive technology, which also should be applied to 3D animation combined with better elements of science and technology. Hand sketching gathers the advantage of pen-paper and computer so that the model rendering will be more quickly, at the same time, to get the efficiency of editing more grid details and provide a basis for creating the internal structure and local details of the complex model; to improve the model quality by algorithm and surface structure for drawing and editing. Meanwhile, hand-painted model rendering and editing in the animation design development trend is worthy of attention as well.

Transmodality and temporality in design interactions

In this paper I explore the “multimodal communication” framework by developing the concept of transmodality. I examine how features of language and embodied action in product design interactions over time consequentially influence the shape of subsequent communicative actions in particular ways, which in turn cumulatively affect the emergence of a design. I show how talk and embodied action themselves constitute through their very properties a central mechanism by which ideas are transformed into designed, real-world objects. Using data collected during an ethnographic study of a design studio in Sweden, I focus on how particular features of a designed object are rendered “transduced” calques of corresponding features of the design interactions that themselves traverse modalities (from, for instance, verbal descriptors like “soft” to particular gesture forms) and ontologies (from debatable topics to fixed material features of an object). Over the course of several interactions in the studio, spanning a number of days, particular gesture forms are repeatedly and consistently linked to particular concepts, which in turn are translated into hand sketches and computer drawings, which are then used to create a prototype ready for show. As I demonstrate, the process of creation is constituted by a generative contrapuntal elaboration between the emerging interactions and the emerging design.

Online Semantic Knowledge Management for Product Design Based on Product Engineering Ontologies

This paper formulates an approach to use the semantic web for knowledge management in the product design domain to provide enhanced capabilities of authoring/updating, querying/reasoning, searching, and visualization of information. Engineering has unique challenges, due to the pervasive use of CAD models and underlying interoperability and integration issues. The authors propose a distributed model composed of a host hybrid-data repository, external public linked data sources, a semantic data management engine, and a web-based user interface layer. The hybrid-data repository consists of ontologies to preserve knowledge for the product design domain and a conventional product data base to utilize legacy design data. Near full integration with a web based environment is achieved. The importance of accessing product related CAD data that has been instantiated in ontology models, querying them, and then displaying the data on a web interface in real time with other legacy data, such as hand sketches and notes that have been scanned and relevant information from conventional rational databases public linked data sites, is a useful and transformational capability. The system clearly facilitates design and information management beyond traditional CAD capabilities and creates a foundation for important capability improvements in the domain.

From engineering diagrams to engineering models: Visual recognition and applications

We present a computational recognition approach to convert network-like, image-based engineering diagrams into engineering models with which computations of interests, such as CAD modeling, simulation, information retrieval and semantic-aware editing, are enabled. The proposed approach is designed to work on diagrams produced using computer-aided drawing tools or hand sketches, and does not rely on temporal information for recognition. Our approach leverages a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as a trainable engineering symbol recognizer. The CNN is capable of learning the visual features of the defined symbol categories from a few user-supplied prototypical diagrams and a set of synthetically generated training samples. When deployed, the trained CNN is applied either to the entire input diagram using a multi-scale sliding window or, where applicable, to each isolated pixel cluster obtained through Connected Component Analysis (CCA). Then the connectivity between the detected symbols are analyzed to obtain an attributed graph representing the engineering model conveyed by the diagram. We evaluate the performance of the approach with benchmark datasets and demonstrate its utility in different application scenarios, including the construction and simulation of control system or mechanical vibratory system models from hand-sketched or camera-captured images, content-based image retrieval for resonant circuits and sematic-aware image editing for floor plans.

Writing as a Tool in Teaching Sketching: Implications for Architectural Design Education

AbstractThis article discusses the process of a study designed to develop university students' sketching skills in schools of architecture. Acknowledging the relationship between cognition and writing, it aims to investigate the role of writing in learning sketching among architecture students and to examine how students regulate their thoughts by writing as they work on their free hand sketches. It includes writing texts before and after sketching tasks to improve sketching. The study was implemented in a school of architecture at a Turkish university as part of an elective course on sketching. The students' works were evaluated in terms of their sketches, texts and self‐reports of their thinking and the views and comments of the tutor who carried out the programme. This article discusses how the study was conceived and developed. The results of this study may provide insights for educators in developing strategies in teaching and learning of sketching and design, using multi modes of thinking.

A fast interactive reverse-engineering system

A new method of reverse engineering for fast, simple and interactive acquisition and reconstruction of a virtual three-dimensional (3D) model is presented. We propose an active stereo acquisition system, which makes use of two infrared cameras and a wireless active-pen device, supported by a reconstruction method based on subdivision surfaces. In the 3D interactive hand sketching process the user draws and refines the 3D style-curves, which characterize the shape to be constructed, by simply dragging the active-pen device; then the system automatically produces a low-resolution mesh that is naturally refined through subdivision surfaces. Several examples demonstrate the ability of the proposed advanced design methodology to produce complex 3D geometric models by the interactive and iterative process that provides the user with a real-time visual feedback on the ongoing work.

Handbook of Gold Exploration and Evaluation.: EOIN H. MACDONALD. 647 Pp. Woodhead Publishing Limited, Cambridge, England. ISBN-10: 1 84569 175-X. ISBN-13: 978 1 84569 175 2. 2007. Price US$370.00.

This lengthy handbook on many aspects of gold geology and mining attempts to address comprehensively most topics that would interest both researchers on gold ores and workers in the gold mining industry. The material appears to represent a summary of knowledge collected by the author over a 65-year-long career as an international mining engineer with an obvious expertise in alluvial gold projects. The text is divided into nine chapters, each about 70 pages in length. The first three chapters of the book focus on the geology of gold and are, by far, the weakest part of the book. The first chapter, “Nature and history of gold,” contains some interesting material on characteristics and formation of placer grains and nuggets. However, discussions of salinity, pH, redox, and metal complexing of gold-bearing fluids are presented without any mention of pressure or temperature, or the use of any phase diagrams, and thus are far too incomplete. Descriptions of gold grains and gold-bearing veins are disappointingly presented as hand sketches that describe textures and colors, rather than showing these in actual photographs. The classification of gold deposits is …

Concurrent comparison of three water contact measurement tools in four endemic villages of the Philippines. The schistosomiasis transmission ecology in the Philippines project (STEP)

Schistosomiasis japonica is a chronic helminthic infection contracted through contact with water infested with Schistosoma japonicum. The infection is associated with severe disease and is an important public health concern in Philippines. To estimate the agreement in the frequency of water contact between bimonthly interviews, self-administered diaries and observations. A total of 286 individuals were followed over either a 4 or a 6 months period. Agreement between direct observation and both the bimonthly and diary methods were estimated. The agreement between the observation and the bimonthly interview was 71.8% when days without any water contacts were considered, but decreased to 23.3% when only days with at least some water contact were considered. The agreement between the observation and the diary was 78.7% when days without any water contacts were considered and 40.8% when only days with some water contacts were considered. Agreement about the degree of water contact is poor between the different measurement tools. This has important implications for future research, since a high degree of measurement error can severely bias any results from studies involving water contact.

MAP IT: The GIS software for field mapping with tablet pc

Map IT is a proper Geographic Information System (GIS) software designed for digital mapping and data capture with tablet pc that ought to be tested and evaluated by field geologists and people who project and use field systems and geologic databases. It can be easily used at different levels of digital knowledge. The digital pen writing on the sunlight readable screen of a rugged tablet pc is similar to the traditional way by which geologists draw lines and other features on a base map and write hand notes on a field book. If the entry level of this software is very simple, going ahead, step by step, Map IT keep its user-friendly interface. Global Positioning System (GPS) connected device allows to capture points (i.e. bedding measurements), lines (i.e. faults and stratigraphic boundaries) and polygons (i.e. landslides, large outcrops) and to georeference any file created by the surveyor via date and time through an intuitive method. Then a slip of yellow paper (Easy Note) can be used to take short notes and link any files (hand notes, recorded sound and/or voice notes, hand sketches, digital photos) by drag-and-drop. After the picture, downloaded from digital camera into the computer, has been linked in Easy Note, a photo display allows to visualize and sketch the photos for outcrop or landscape interpretations and notes. Moreover any kind of software useful for data capturing (i.e. spreadsheets, stereoplots, etc.) can be used to generate files which can be linked to Map IT database. If the mapping project is pre-organized by standardized symbology and conventional ontology for interoperability, the project manager can easily customize forms to be filled by the surveyors to input data directly into the database. However, the field geologist can keep flexibility in unexpected field situations using Easy Note and other digital note and sketch recorder in addition. In case of working with groups of surveyors, the data can be sent via communications technologies (GPRS or UMTS) to a central server with high reduction of time for building a GIS or more simply a real-time cartography, which would be important, for example, when natural or anthropogenic disasters occur.

Graphical Communication Using Hand-Drawn Sketches in Civil Engineering

Hand-drawn sketches are still an important tool used by civil engineers to graphically communicate technical information. New engineers often have inadequate experience preparing sketches by hand to effectively communicate information graphically. As a result of using computer aided drafting and digital cameras in both engineering education and professional practice, hand-sketching skills are being overlooked. Practicing engineers from an earlier generation generally appreciate the importance of being able to quickly prepare sketches to communicate a concept to a client or to quickly gather and transmit information from field observations. With limited experience in hand sketching, current students may not see the benefits of such skills. To increase student graphical communication skills and develop an appreciation for hand sketching, opportunities to develop and practice hand-sketching skills can be incorporated within the undergraduate curriculum. Examples of hand-sketching exercises intended to help improve students’ graphical communication skills are presented.

Dimensionality reduction and visualization of geoscientific images via locally linear embedding

The locally linear embedding (LLE) algorithm is useful for analyzing sets of very different geoscientific images, ranging from smooth potential field images, to sharp outputs from modeling fracturing and fluid flows via cellular automata, to hand sketches of geological sections. LLE maps the very high-dimensional space embedding the images into 2-D, arranging the images on a plane. This arrangement highlights basic relationships between the features contained in the images, thereby greatly simplifying the visual inspection of the entire data set. Other applications include image classification, and visualization of the results of inverse modeling of geological problems in order to characterize domains of different mechanical behavior.