Camera-Based Whiteboard Reading for Understanding Mind Maps

Abstract

Mind maps, i.e. the spatial organization of ideas and concepts around a central topic and the visualization of their relations, represent a very powerful and thus popular means to support creative thinking and problem solving processes. Typically created on traditional whiteboards, they represent an important technique for collaborative brainstorming sessions. We describe a camera-based system to analyze hand-drawn mind maps written on a whiteboard. The goal of the presented system is to produce digital representations of such mind maps, which would enable digital asset management, i.e. storage and retrieval of manually created documents. Our system is based on image acquisition by means of a camera, followed by the segmentation of the particular whiteboard image focusing on the extraction of written context, i.e. the ideas captured by the mind map. The spatial arrangement of these ideas is recovered using layout analysis based on unsupervised clustering, which results in graph representations of mind maps. Finally, handwriting recognition derives textual transcripts of the ideas captured by the mind map. We demonstrate the capabilities of our mind map reading system by means of an experimental evaluation, where we analyze images of mind maps that have been drawn on whiteboards, without any further constraints other than the underlying topic. In addition to the promising recognition results, we also discuss training strategies, which effectively allow for system bootstrapping using out-of-domain sample data. The latter is important when addressing creative thinking processes where domain-related training data are difficult to obtain as they focus on novelty by definition.

A Basis of Cultural Education: Safeguarding Intangible Heritage Through a Web-Based Digital Photographic Collection

“…Majority (15) of the target respondents indicated that they did not have experience with oral story telling by their parents or elders compared to a minortiy (5) of the respondents who had d oral story telling from their elders. A slight majority (11) of the respondents had no of the importance of cultural heritage for the younger generation and the same holds n it comes to the question item that asked if they knew the causes for low interest in cultural heritage by the younger generation, most respondents (15) indicated that they did not if the objectives as outline in the first section of questionnaires to the target students from Sultan Idris Education University as their GDH system. Twenty (20) respondents from the to complete and submit the evaluation form.…”

“…Based on the section of basic cultural heritage knowledge, majority of 'yes' that indeed they had a basic understanding of the cultural heritage concept (Figure 4). Majority (15) of the target respondents indicated that they did not have telling by their parents or elders experienced oral story telling from their elders. knowledge of the importance of cultural heritage for the younger generation and the same holds true when it comes to the question item that asked if they knew the causes for low interest in cultural heritage by the younger generation, most respondents (15) indicated that they did not know what the factors were.…”

“…Majority (15) of the target respondents indicated that they did not have telling by their parents or elders experienced oral story telling from their elders. knowledge of the importance of cultural heritage for the younger generation and the same holds true when it comes to the question item that asked if they knew the causes for low interest in cultural heritage by the younger generation, most respondents (15) indicated that they did not know what the factors were. was to investigate if the objectives as outline in the first section of this paper has been achieved or not through the distribution of questionnaires to the target is study made use of students from Sultan Idris Education University primary target respondents in evaluating the E-GDH system.…”

Computer Science & Information Technology (CS & IT )

“…For Understanding Mind Maps (Vajda et al, 2015) The study was aimed at producing digitally illustrated mind maps which would allow for digitally managing assets through storage and retrieval of such records.…”

Robust Localization of Texts in Real-World Images

“…They group small components into successively larger components until all regions in the image are identi¯ed. 8,34 These methods¯rst extract potential characters through edge detection, 5,42 MSER detection 2,13,37 or color clustering 38 approaches. Afterwards, geometric and statistical constraints are used to reject noncharacter regions.…”