Reading #10

Comments:
Ozgur

Summary:

This paper describes the HUNCH system, which is a primitive sketch recognition system. Not fully functional as Paleo, but considering the year 1976 that it has been published, HUNCH has given many important concept of what a well-functioning sketch recognition system should have.

The HUNCH system works the way like: first, find the corners by the speed of drawing, usually the corner is the local minima of the speed function. Then, latch these endpoints there are near to each other -- if they are within a radius of each other. The last two steps are related to inference the intend of the user. However, this inference does not come from a learned classifier like nowadays approach, but from the context that user provided -- a simple discretion of the hierarchical interpretation of the data.

Since more empathies has been put to the interpretation, different "recognition" result will be generated by different user interpretation.

Discussion:

Considering the  year it has been published, undoubtedly this paper has provided the most basic steps that a recognition system should have, like a corner finder, latching/connector.

However, this system does not seem like to be a "recognition" system, if user can give rich context to describe what they would like to draw, why the system bother to guess/recognize what is the intend of user. The context can tell anything if well defined.

So this is more like a augmented drawing or paint stuff -- the user gives a primitive drawing that assigns some basic constrains -- some feature point like line/corners or alike-- that the final shape should follow, and tell the system what they would like to draw by a context, then the system beautify the primitive drawing of the user.

Even though I do not think there is too much in the paper can be applied for nowadays recognition domain. This is a very interesting trace to follow, imagine we can get a very simple drawing tools that a novice can produce a very complicated work. However, we need to design a good context -- simple to the user but rich enough for computer to understand.