In the future, one may be able to do a search on the Internet by just submitting a sketch or a doodle —if a new computer program is perfected.

 

The program is under development by researchers at Brown University and the Technical University in Berlin, tech site Mashable reported.

 

“The gap between human and computational performance is not so big, not as big certainly as it is in other computer vision problems,” Mashable quoted team member James Hays, a computer scientist at Brown, as saying.

 

Mashable added the advance could help pave the way for sketch-based interfaces and search applications, say the software’s developers.

 

For now, the researchers are planning to expand the software’s capabilities by turning it into a gaming app that can collect data human players may provide.

 

“The algorithm really needs to see close to 100 instances of how people draw lions, and then it becomes possible to tell lions from potted plants,” Hays said.

 

In their research, the developers programmed their software to learn to recognize doodles hand-drawn by humans, under 250 object categories.

 

When they gave the program new sketches and asked it to identify them in real time, the program identified sketches with 56 percent accuracy.

 

But this was still below the humans' accuracy mark of 70 percent - and limited to the 250 categories it had seen previously. — TJD, GMA News