Researchers from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) have built the first computer program that can recognise hand-drawn sketches better than humans.

Known as Sketch-a-Net, the program is capable of correctly identifying the subject of sketches 74.9 per cent of the time compared to humans that only managed a success rate of 73.1 per cent. As sketching becomes more relevant with the increase in the use of touchscreens, the development could provide a foundation for new ways to interact with computers.

The research, which was accepted at the British Machine Vision Conference, also showed that the program performed better at determining finer details in sketches. For example, it was able to successfully distinguish the specific bird variants 'seagull', 'flying-bird', 'standing-bird' and 'pigeon' with 42.5 per cent accuracy compared to humans that only achieved 24.8 per cent.

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