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Life-drawing robot could teach us about art

By Sandrine Ceurstemont

31 March 2010

FROM afar this image could be a photograph of Stephen Hawking. Zoom closer and you can see it’s a pretty good sketch, the kind a street artist might rustle up for tourists. Yet this is not the work of any human hand but of a robot.

was created by and , computer scientists at Goldsmiths, University of London. It attempts to recreate the thought process that Tresset, a former draughtsman, unconsciously moves through when drawing someone’s face. First, Tresset identifies the face’s orientation and looks for shaded regions, subconsciously working…

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