Reading #10 Herot

Summary:
This paper presents the Hunch System, a set of Fortran programs design to process freehand sketches. The programs are designed to work modular, one's out put can be an input to another one. STRAIT, the corner finding program, finds corners based on speed and curvature. CURVIT fits the strokes to B-splines.

STRAIT used a Latching method to merge vertices that fell in the same radius which failed in some cases, particularly the corners that were apart in z values were being lathed. Overtracing, a users intention to represent a single line with several overlapping strokes had the similar problem. It was not easy to distinguish between two carefully drawn parallel strokes and overtraced ones. The program could also infer 3D data in perspective drawings by using some simple projection rules. It also had a room finding algorithm for simple floor plans that worked by mapping the drawing to simple 2d grid.


Discussion:

Considering the STRAIT and CURVIT, this paper could be thought of father of PaleoSketch. This paper was particularly interesting to me since they tried to do some of the work I'm doing for my research 30 years ago :) I was amazed to see that they ran into similar king of problems that I did, especially in latchig, overtracing.