I've been reading about attempts to write software that approximates the steps that children go through when they create drawings. This gets at some of the fundamental differences between how machine currently generate images in "artistic" styles (using brushstroke filters in Photoshop, for example) and how an artist paints. By trying to shortcut past the early representational stages, we have failed to capture some of the important things about what it means for a person to create a painting.
One of the best papers I've found is called Thoughtful Drawings: A Computational Model of the Cognitive Nature of Children’s Drawing. It describes a piece of software called Rose (Representation Of Spatial Experience). The author states, "Rose is not intended to be a model of any part of a child’s mind. Rose is a representation of personal ideas about just a few vital elements of the human experience of drawing."
Rose takes as input a 3D form, composed of triangular surfaces.
From this form, it recognizes certain parts that are joined together-- the legs, the neck, and the tail all joined to the body, and the head joined to the neck. Each of these body parts is fit with a cylinder.
Then the program attempts to draw the shape. It attempts to create closed curves (by moving a "pen" around with an imperfect control algorithm) whose length and width are determined by the proportions of the cylindrical body parts, and are connected in the same way.
This projection doesn't take into account perspective, viewpoint or occlusion: it simply copies the connectivity of the graph of how the body parts join together. This seems to me to be how children begin to draw. We could test this by giving children an unfamiliar shape and seeing if the drawings tend to follow this rule. I would also like to know when a child will use a closed curve and when they will simply use a line to represent a part.
I would like to do something similar to this, but add in an extra step. I would like to give the program a computer vision capability that allows it to look at its own drawings and see how much they resemble realistic line drawings of the same subjects (or, more practically, semantic contour detection on photos of the same subjects). Depending on how good the resemblance is, it could choose what lines to keep and what lines to erase and try again. This extra judgement step is an important aspect of how people create art.
One of the best papers I've found is called Thoughtful Drawings: A Computational Model of the Cognitive Nature of Children’s Drawing. It describes a piece of software called Rose (Representation Of Spatial Experience). The author states, "Rose is not intended to be a model of any part of a child’s mind. Rose is a representation of personal ideas about just a few vital elements of the human experience of drawing."
Rose takes as input a 3D form, composed of triangular surfaces.
This projection doesn't take into account perspective, viewpoint or occlusion: it simply copies the connectivity of the graph of how the body parts join together. This seems to me to be how children begin to draw. We could test this by giving children an unfamiliar shape and seeing if the drawings tend to follow this rule. I would also like to know when a child will use a closed curve and when they will simply use a line to represent a part.
I would like to do something similar to this, but add in an extra step. I would like to give the program a computer vision capability that allows it to look at its own drawings and see how much they resemble realistic line drawings of the same subjects (or, more practically, semantic contour detection on photos of the same subjects). Depending on how good the resemblance is, it could choose what lines to keep and what lines to erase and try again. This extra judgement step is an important aspect of how people create art.
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