Perceptually Based Learning of Shape Descriptions

The Problem: In the past few years our group has developed sketching systems for several design domains, including mechanical engineering and software. Each new domain required writing new shape recognizers. We are currently developing a generic sketching system where a new domain can be added simply by providing textual descriptions of the domain symbols in a shape description language [1]. Each symbol is described in terms of geometric primitives (lines, arcs, ovals, etc.) and constraints between them (connects, parallel, above,horizontal, shorter, etc.). Simply drawing the new shapes, however, would be even more natural than typing the descriptions. The system we are building will automatically produce a textual description of the symbol from a user’s drawing, preferably, using only one example.