Robots Draw Faces and Doodle For London Gallery Goers

ptresset writes with a snippet from Wired: "Pop along to the Tenderpixel art space in Soho this month, and you could grab a drawing of your mug, sketched by one of Patrick Tresset's robotic arms. The sketching bot is called Paul. It starts off the exhibition by scanning the room and looking for people with its motorised eye. When it spots a human face, it uses an edge detection technique called Gabor filter (which is modeled after cells in a human's visual cortex) to pick out the salient lines."

Re:Robot porn!

[Nidi62]

Hey, as long as Skynet spends all its time looking at robot porn rather than taking over the world, I wont complain.

Gah... it's attrocious!

[mark-t]

The whole left side of the guy's face looked like it was covered in spider webs or something. The guy may have had long hair, but at no point was it hanging over the whole side of his face.

Granted, the guy was illuminated on the right hand side, and was thus slightly darker on the left (his right), but if that was the robot's attempt at shadow... all I can say is... it needs work.

Gabor Filters

[Anonymous Coward]

It's unclear from the article exactly what processing goes on to get to the sketch, but if plain Gabor filters were actually used for edge detection, the result might not be that good. Phase congruency [uwa.edu.au] is a measure that uses Gabor filters to produce a pretty good edge detection result. Posting as anon so I don't look like a know-it-all; I'm not affiliated with Peter Kovesi, either.

Well, it would seem

[mandark1967]

that slackers are the first people in the workforce who'll be replaced by our robotic overlords.

Haven't we had this for years?

[ewanm89]

A camera, an edge detection algorithm and a printer.

Disney

[th77]

Weren't there Disney robots that did this in EPCOT Center, back in the 80s?