Visual Analogies at Multiple Levels of Abstraction

We describe a method for constructing a teleological model of an unlabelled 2D line drawing by analogy to a known model of a drawing with similar structure. The source case is represented as a schema that contains its line drawing and its teleological model represented at multiple levels of abstraction: the lines and intersections in the drawing, the shapes, the structural components and connections, the causal interactions and processes, and the function of the device depicted in the drawing. Given a target drawing and a relevant source case, our method of compositional analogy first constructs a representation of the lines and the intersections in the target drawing, then uses the mappings at the level of line intersections to transfer the shape representations from the source case to the target, next uses the mappings at the level of shapes to transfer the full teleological model of the depicted system from the source to the target.