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2008
Conference Paper
Title
From the paper sketch to the virtual sketch: Creative interpretation of sketches via sctive contours
Abstract
A product having to meet today's requirements is also subject to an ever-increasing degree of individualization. As a result, due to competition more emphasis is being placed on additional differentiation features brought about by innovative design. Product design starts with conceptual design including the concepts for the future product's shape and function - the "gestalt". In this stage, the designers work on fuzzy product data interpreted in paper sketches and applied to perception modelling and shape creating. In the paper we will suppose methods to analyze paper sketches to create virtual sketches that construe the perception of the subject. In particular, the paper discusses special geometrical issues that are concerned with the creative interpretation of the future product's contours. That is based on the method of active contours, which is used in image processing to recognize the contours of fuzzy objects, especially in cases where images are distorted due to interference or artifacts. With this method, not only the information in the discrete image pixels is utilized but also arbitrary, so-called initial contours, which have been varied through image information. The paper describes a new method of using active contours for the creative interpretation of conceptual sketches. Here, the sketches are understood as being fuzzy 2-D representations of 3-D shapes from which object contours are then developed in further detail. The application is mainly orientated towards the segmentation of morphologically related regions present in the conceptual paper sketches.