Now, draw sketches to buy products online!

Shopping online may just get easier, thanks to a new computer programme developed by scientists that recognises sketches of goods drawn by consumers to display more accurate search results.
The computer programme system is designed to emulate the human brain's processing through arrays of simulated neurons, researchers said.
The sketches of a pair of shoes or piece of furniture, for example, are drawn directly by hand on a touchscreen and recognised using a sophisticated image retrieval system, where the top 10 retrieval accuracy is close to 100 per cent on some object categories so that it always displays the desired product on the first page, they said.

"What is great about our system is that the user does not have to be an artist for the sketch to be accurate, yet is able to retrieve images in a more precise manner than text," said Yi-Zhe Song from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) in the UK.
"With the proliferation of touch-screens, sketching had become a much easier to do and in some ways is actually preferable to text-based or photo searches," he said.
Fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) overcomes problems with using words to describe visual objects in words, especially when dealing with precise details, and with using photos, which can restrict the search far too narrowly, researchers said.

"For the first time users are presented with a system that can perform fine-grained retrieval of images - this leap forward unlocks the commercial adaptation of image search for companies," said Timothy Hospedales from QMUL.
"Current image search capabilities provided by online retailers only perform category-level searches so for customers it is still a tedious 'browsing' exercise to find your ideal item. Now you can simply sketch your mental image of your ideal product and go straight to it," said Hospedales.
The computer programme was trained to match sketches to photos based on about 30,000 sketch-photo comparisons, learning how to interpret salient details of photos and how people try to depict them in hand-drawing, researchers said.