Digital Artifacts of Daniel

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Summary:

Has a large collection of photos and sketches of those photos.  To map the nonlinear relationship between photos and sketches, several models are generated by Embedded Hidden Markov Models (E-HMMs) which each produce a pseudo-sketch.  The author then uses a strategy he calls “selective ensemble” to produce a finer pseudo-sketch from the others.

The E-HMMs have two states: super-states that represent the vertical macro-features (forehead, eyes, nose, etc.) and then these have embedded states that describe the local features.

Discussed earlier work that mapped the nonlinear relationship between photo and sketch by using patches. This involves divvying up the photos and sketches into small overlapping patches and, for each patch, finding the neighbors that similar to it, calculating a “reconstruction weight” for each neighbor, and then using these weights to sketch that patch.  A pseudo-sketch is a combination of all the patches.  However, there was a fine dance between the sizes of the patches and how much they overlapped that one would have to deal with to get details while avoiding artifacts.

Also discussed an approach using E-HMMs and Viterbi decoding that did not work.

Discussion:

It seems like a very solid technique, but I still don’t have a corpus of images.  Not sure I could digest this paper anyway.  The patch approach made more sense to me.  He did mention a non-example-based face sketch synthesis approach that I’m looking into.

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This is a arbitrary Word document that I discovered on the website for the South Carolina Consortium for Gifted Education.  It is not a published work, but as useful information on Clark’s Drawing Abilities Test (CDAT).  It mainly covers the brief history of CDAT’s development and provides a little more insight into how it works. I’ve copied a few interesting segments out of it:

“Drawing with a pencil or crayon on paper is the most frequently exercised art activity of most children and, therefore, the least intimidating art exercise for a testing situation.”

“The Scoring Criteria Scale is based upon properties of art works that teachers use for instruction and are derived from the writings of Harry Broudy (1972). These are: (1) sensory properties, (2) formal properties, (3) expressive properties, and (4) technical properties.”  - I’m particularly interested in these properties used for scoring, but it appears I need to order the test to do so.

Had each instance of the test scored by three independent teachers and the results had “a high degree of agreement.”

UPDATE: Found a better outline of the scoring criteria here.

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Chapter 2:

This is a book for teachers and administrators on identifying, teaching, and guiding “talented art students”.  This includes everything from misconceptions of a “talent” to a curriculum to actually employ.  More importantly is the second chapter, where the authors discuss identifying said students.

It outlines a test called the Clark’s Drawing Abilities Test which requires the participant to create four specific drawings of specific scenes, and these are ranked by his/her art teacher as “below average”, “average”, and “above average”. Unfortunately the criteria for these ratings are not listed here, but I did find them in another paper.  The tasks and their criteria are:

1) Draw an interesting house as if you were looking at it from the across the street. (perspective, texture, size, recognition of detail)

2) Draw a person who is running very fast. (action, body proportion, recognition of detail)

3) Make a drawing of you and your friends playing in the playground. (receding space, grouping)

4) Make a fantasy drawing form your imagination. (imagination)

This test appears to be best administered to children, though it was tested on college-level and down while establishing its validity.  I say this because the author himself makes a comment about how the tasks fit well with younger children because at this age, they are trying to gain realism in their drawings and not work toward creative derivatives.

Such a test would serve well as a normalization factor or opening exercise to a future user study.  Borrowing from Gardner, it’s also just a good idea to have the participants of any user study drawing AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

This test can also not be a standalone assessment of an individual’s ability.  First, the author has a blatent disclaimer not to use CDAT as a means of qualification or cut-off.  Second, he also says that scores, while maintain a normal distribution, will vary by school, county, state, etc.  and that an individual’s background, age, personality, and values.

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The way to assess someone’s abilities with the arts is not through a multiple-choice test and so on.  Subjects must be invovled in actually artistic creation (painting, composing, etc.), more specifically, actual projects that expose them to their artistic abilities and allow them to reflect on them, then they are assessed.  The idea is that since many have not be exposed to art, they must first be allowed to play in the space for a little while before being given a problem to solve that determines their ability.

Aspects of the assessment: (1) production, (2) perception, (3) reflection.  (1): Students must be drawing, as this is central.  Not merely copying, but also works of their own composition.  (2 and 3): The student must learn to perceive, or see, better to make “finer discriminations”, and then step back from the latter two states and say, “What am I doing? How can I make it better? Am I successful?”

Gave example of instructing the student to create alterations on an existing piece: Take “Twinkle, twinkle” and sing it happy, sad, 3/4 time, and so on.  What validity is there to encouraging derivatives of a work and how do I grade it?

Another example: Showing derivatives of the Mona Lisa and letting the child find the differences, entering a state of reflection. Also has them copy signatures or other people’s work (perception->reflection->production).  Another activity is having them build a portfolio that serves as a databse of their progress.

Discussed his theory on multiple intelligences. Good read.

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Chapter 1: Early Inquiry, Research, and Testing of Children’s Art Abilities

Covered the early history (1900-1942) of developing “standardized” testing for art screening, first was in 1913.  All performed on children.  Manual created 18 principles about the “talent of drawing” that he gleamed from some 45 standardized tests on writing, drawing, and intelligence.

Chapter 5: Norman C Meier: A Critique of His Tests and Research

Covers Norman C. Meier’s test and research.  He is the head honcho of art testing during this early history.

“He decided that measurement of aesthetic judgment afforded the greatest potential for success and adherence to psychological measurement standards and practices.” (47)

“…all great works of art exhibit balance, stability, harmony, unity, symmetry, proportion, and rhythm successfully and that aesthetic judgment consists of being able to recognize and capitalize upon successful use of these aesthetic structures” (47)

Going on “aesthetic judgment”, created his first test by using artist’s originals and then reproducing slightly altered versions for comparison in the test (pick out the original).  After lots of iterations, ended up with a set of 50 dual choice sets and 10 four-choice sets, and a dissertation once administered several times.

The Meier test ultimately received lots of criticism by academia and artists alike, but it’s foundation work and simplicity of execution still led to many contributions.

Meier was a painter himself.

Chapter 6: Questioning Art Testing

Apparently Meier met much opposition in his testing of adult artist, many who were offended or didn’t see the point of testing the intelligence of artists.  His graduate assistants recalled that he was not an artist, but wanted to be one.  Apparently color blind too?  He was an observer in the art world and not really a participant. Children did find his tests fun, however, mainly because they were a break in the monotony of school work. Obviously I will need to look to later art tests to determine some valid.

Chapter 9: Recent Inquiry, Research, and Testing of Children’s Art Abilities

Appears that the common sentiment is that of the few tests that came out for visual arts between 1920’s and 1950’s, none of them were any good.  Additional work continued from 1960’s to 1980’s, but only two were ever made available commercially and were even able to be performed on a national-level (thus none have a achieved recognition as a standard).

There was one nationally administered test (NAEP:Art) by the government in 1977 and 1981 through ETS (people that do most of the national testing) that basically proved that no one knew his art history.  Book did not go into detail of it’s assessments.

Claire Golomb added a new facit to testing by having a open discussion with the child participant as s/he drew to discover more of the creative process.  Essentially proved that a child’s scribble are, in fact, intentional and meant to look like something (p93).  “…even young children are attempting to depict something when they draw and very frequently are dissatisfied with their drawings because the drawing falls short of their expectations. They recognize that the drawings do not look like what they are attempting to draw.”

While the Golomb and a few other followed a more psychological tangent for art testing, a forerunner in the analysis of visual arts education was Project Zero at Harvard (has Howard Gardner), which pushed a more aesthetics approach like Meier did.  Project Zero has been going strong for 40 years.

Chapter 10: Implications for the Future of Inquiry, Research, and Testing of Children’s Art Abilities

Shared criticisms that art testing is less about improving education and more about handling large numbers of applicants and about how to distribute funds.  The convienience of assigning a three-digit number to a person is appealing.

“Probably one of the best means of understanding art students is to watch them when they work and observce what they do.” (p99)

(Obviously) “…tests should be used as screening procedures or achievement procedures to see if students learn something over a period of time.” (100)

There is no standard curriculum for art classes, so you can’t have an SAT-like test (the SAT is based on the public school curriculum).  Because art has no tests, supposed the public doesn’t take it as a “purposeful subject.”

This latter chapter was a monologue between the three authors of the book and covered more the politics, environment, and philsophy behind creating and administering art tests, but did not cover anything that these tests might consist of, which is the meat that I’m looking for…

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Summary:

“The suggested implication is that all students have drawing and spatial potential that may be developed through art education in general, and through drawing experiences in particular.”

Some believe that the skill of drawing is “important to the total development of a child.” (Dr. Edwards has expressed the same sentiment).

Claims that art education, in the earlier 20th century, was part of the “practical needs of life (craft oriented)” and helped with development of hand-eye coordination and mechanical skills.  This was replaced by a belief that art was more for enrichment, thus art teachers became baby-sitters encouraging self-expression and not instructors, which led to the misnomer of artists being the select few given some innate ability.

Apparently there are many tests for scoring children from one-to-five on their ability to draw, particularly Clark’s Drawing Abilities Test.

Another test is the Test of Visual-Perception Skills (TVPS), which is used to “evalutated mental capabilities related to spatial ability.” It is discussed, but does not appear to be revisited elsewhere in the text. It is described as “an easy-to-use assessment to determine a child’s visual perceptual strengths and weaknesses. Visual perception is an important ability that enables one to make sense out of what is seen (in contrast to visual acuity tests that determine just that something was seen by the individual).”

States how spatial ability is used in lots of tasks, fields, and professions (mathematics, technical drawing, woodwork, engineering, interior design, and of course drawing).  Made claims to a tie between spatial ability and intelligence.  Could drawing be a way to increase intelligence? is their question.

“Since it has already been established that visual-perceptual skills can be trained and that they are synonymous with spatial skills by definition, it follows that each would benefit from the same training. Learning to draw may be one of these common areas.”

“Visual perception is learned.” (pg 6)

“Drawing, as an output of visual perception, enables the conversion of abstract visualization to concrete product.” (pg 6)

“Perceptual skill development is also recognized as a necessary skill in mental development.” (pg 6)

“Training in visual literacy/communication through visual-perception and drawing training may enhance the effectiveness of the use of [computers] whether it be developer or user.” (pg 6)

“Drawing training, because of its relationship with visual literacy and other cognitive areas, is essential to the total educational development of a child and has particular significance with respect to the ever-advancing communication technologies.” (pg 7)

Discussion:

These resources say it possible to find out how a person is perceiving something.  They also say drawing helps improve spatial abilities which ties heavily to many of the areas of work, disciple, and intelligence.

I intend to research more into the CDAT for a way to computational calculate its metrics.

While my intent for reading this paper was to find work that was counter to that of Dr. Edwards, it did lead to many great resources and provide validity to the purpose of this application.

On a reread, the summary and conclusion section is quite good.

How does this relate to my drawing application?  It affirms that the goal is helping the user “see” or visually perceive what is in front of him.

Web Link (Related)

Summary:

Creates a manually-defined heuristics-based engine that checks the parameters of a user’s sketch for a floor plan.  The sketch recognition is not deep as it is mainly boxes or blobs (rooms) and lines (doors and windows). The application then runs through it’s heuristics to see that the certain labeled rooms meet the proper criteria based on where they are (e.g. “the Emergency Room should be closer to the Entrance Lobby”).

Heuristics are defined in a simple tuple form: (<requirement> <room> <room>) for example (SHOULD-BE-ADJACENT ER ICU).  These heuristics are manually input by an expert and not automatically gleamed.  This allows for text feedback when a heuristic is violated.  The system takes into account the placement of doors and arrangement of rooms.

The sketch is later converted in a simple walkthrough 3D model using VRML.

Discussion:

This idea is similar to the domain-independent approach of LADDER, except the defined constraints are not used to recognition domain symbols but to verify the placement of those symbols.  The user is responsible for labeling the rooms.  The system only recognizes that a box or blob is a room.

How is this applicable to drawing a face? We already know certain things about the face (i.e. placement of the eyes in relation to the nose, etc.) that won’t change from face to face, but a heuristic here can be supplanted by just having the user follow a step by step methdology (e.g. draw the nose; now draw the eyes).  However, it would be nice to have a more generic approach so that steps do not have to be handcrafted.

ACM Portal Link

Summary:

“Thus, we observed that both the tutor and the student refer to
prior utterances: the tutor refers to past explanations in order
to point out similarities or differences to a prior problemsolving
situation. The student refers to prior explanations
in order to ask questions about how prior problem-solving
steps relate to the current step. These observations led us to
provide facilities that allow both the system and the user to
make use of the dialogue history.”

Has a set of features or “facets” that is uses to determine if problems are the same or similar.  The application can then automatically refer back to them whenever the user steps through a problem to review it with the application (done after each problem is completed).

“Reminding students of all the instances of a
principle and stating this principle should promote better
understanding of the principle and when it can be applied
than repeatedly stating the principle as each instance of it
arises.”

Discussion:

It is an interesting idea to reinforce and allow review/query from the dialogue history that has been recorded between a computer and a human.  It helps to “drive the point home” and allows the interaction to feel like that of a normal tutor/student session.

How can this be applied to sketch recognition?  We are able to pull features out of strokes quite easily, but none that really deal with the user’s intention.  We can give them a task to create some primitive or collection of shapes, when it goes into the realm of what I’m trying to do (an application that can assist you in drawing), it would appear to be tougher?  The system might have some knowledge (e.g. “You need to draw the corners on the right eye like you drew them on the left eye.”), but I’m failing to see an example where the steps would be redundant (except when drawing reference lines).

Good idea, better for systems that deal with natural language processing.

Review of This Article

Summary:

Used eye tracker and brain scanning to externally and internally analyze how a single artist looked back and forth between reference and canvas when doing portrait drawing.

Defined the simple cycle that an artist repeats to create a drawing: 1. Looking at a specific detail of the model; 2. Turning towards the picture; 3. Drawing or painting the detail; 4. Looking at the picture.

“Our principal finding from the eyetracker study of Humphrey Ocean at work was that his eye movements while drawing a portrait were different from his normal eye movements.  While drawing, he made a sequence of regular single fixations on selected details of the model’s face.”

Other observations made that are interesting:

1. The capture of visual information detail by detail, rather than in a more holistic manner, is reflected in the way the drawing or painting is built up.  This proceeds systematically, by small geometric areas, gradually building up to the picture’s main elements: right eye, left eye, nose, lips, etc. Each detail and each element is of intrinsic importance.

4. Nevertheless, the eye and eye-hand skills alone cannot define the picture production process.  Other artists working from life in Humphrey’s style have similar skills and goals, yet, if asked to draw the same model, would produce entirely different portraits.  The reason for this is not how they draw, but what they draw.

5. The last observation centres on this choice: “At any given moment I will start from what I can see from where I am.  I try to achieve a likeness.  But what I want is a likeness to the reaction I have to something I can see”.

Discussion:

This is a good read to skim about how an artist works when creating a picture.  Doesn’t go much into generalizations as this is only one artist, but it’s just a good reference with a defined process of what an artist does.

Introduction:
-drawing is a “whole” skill requiring a limited set of basic components
-five basic skills of drawing: (1) perception of edges, (2) perception of spaces, (3) perception of relationships, (4) perception of lights and shadows, (5) perception of the while, or gesalt
-teach the five principles and present conditions for the L-mode to reject what is seen so the R-mode will be used

Chapter 1:
-drawing is not driven by manual skill, but can be learned by anyone with average eyesight (3)
-the key to drawing is to set the proper conditions to look (5)
-this I can use…
-”all drawing is the same” except for the degree of complexity

Chapter 2: First Exercise
-view the example of other students on the exercise before beginning, when directed (12)
-need to use her terminology from the Glossary where possible, like L-mode and R-mode instead of left brain and right brain
-she has them draw reference lines beforehand, not requiring them to try to draw it straight themselves
-statement: required to put down reference lines for the user
-using the “cardboard” viewfinder, could have them draw a straight edge (if they draw on the “cardboard”, it’s the same as drawing flush against it)
- like the comment on (21) that this book is just to teach how to break looking stereotypically, not teaching to express yourself
-maybe saying “teaching a user how to draw” is not the goal of this research, but instead “how to best provide corrective feedback”
-talks about different styles of lines on “25″, calling the overtraced line “bold” (will definitely need an eraser so they can clean up old attempts that haven’t been faded automatically)

Chapter 3: L-mode and R-mode
-presented studies and cases that heavily suggest that each hemisphere of the brain is its own mind and functioning unit for specific tasks, developing asymmetrically
-each side has its own perception of reality (32)
-our current education system is designed more for the left-brain crowd
-sometimes they work together, sometimes one if more dominant, other times they can conflict
-it appears that the right brain processes visual information in “a mode suitiable for drawing” (35)
-discussed many of the cultural and linguistic reference to a left/right split, though I chose to skip these
-interesting: “using the right hemisphere, we understand metaphors,we dream, we create new combinations, of ideas (38)
-right-handed people are more lateralized than left-hander people
-good breakdown of L-mode versus R-mode on (44)
-the L-mode is very prone to be dominant and “rush in with words and symbols, even taking over jobs which it is not good at”
-need tasks that the dominate L-mode will turn down (46)