Deep Learning for Free-Hand Sketch: A Survey

Free-hand sketches are highly illustrative, and have been widely used by humans to depict objects or stories from ancient times to the present. The recent prevalence of touchscreen devices has made sketch creation a much easier task than ever and consequently made sketch-oriented applications increasingly popular. The progress of deep learning has immensely benefited free-hand sketch research and applications. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the deep learning techniques oriented at free-hand sketch data, and the applications that they enable. The main contents of this survey include: (i) A discussion of the intrinsic traits and unique challenges of free-hand sketch, to highlight the essential differences between sketch data and other data modalities, e.g., natural photos. (ii) A review of the developments of free-hand sketch research in the deep learning era, by surveying existing datasets, research topics, and the state-of-the-art methods through a detailed taxonomy and experimental evaluation. (iii) Promotion of future work via a discussion of bottlenecks, open problems, and potential research directions for the community.Comment: This paper is accepted by IEEE TPAM

Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century

Copyright @ 2010 Greenleaf PublicationsLeNS project funded by the Asia Link Programme, EuropeAid, European Commission

Design for automated manufacture of composite structures

New trends in manufacturing highlight the growing use of composite materials to produce lightweight, high performance structures. This requires the design stage to account for complex manufacturing constraints, and as industry begins to move towards automated manufacturing of composites, the more complex manufacturing constraints can introduce severe limitations to the design space, reducing the opportunity for designers to optimise a product. To address these limitations, this research proposes strategies for implementing design for manufacture specifically accounting for automated manufacture of composite structures. As a composite design develops, more detail is added, increasing the design fidelity. Typically design for manufacturing practices are only applied when the design fidelity is detailed enough to see individual plies. However, by implementing design for manufacturing practice at earlier stages of the design, when the design fidelity is low and design change is easy to implement, the greatest performance and manufacturing gains can be achieved. This research aims to develop a design process that uses digital technology to facilitate design for automated manufacture for composite structures. This research uses a systematic approach to create a generic design process and supporting tools, capable of identifying the key manufacturing constraints, and accounting for them at the earliest possible stages of the design. The proposed design process uses a strategy to apply design for manufacture using digital tools, and identifies actions required to enable automated composite manufacturing. The development of the design process is guided by the capture of the current industrial design practices. The proposed process is validated through the design and manufacture of an industrial demonstration structure, produced using an automated composite manufacturing process. The results from validation confirm the hypothesis that it is possible to have a generic design process to support the design for automated manufacturing of composites components

The technical designer: a new craft approach for creating seamless knitwear

The separation of the design and technical roles within commercial knitwear design has led to a 'technical skills gap' between designers and industrial knitting technology, which has contributed to the communication problems between designers and technicians. Historically, these issues have been ignored and designers have accepted compromised versions of their original ideas. However, the advent of seamless knitting technology has exacerbated the issue and the skills gap has grown exponentially, as designers struggle to engage with seamless knitting processes. The nature of seamless garment design is that all aspects must be considered simultaneously, and pattern-­‐cutting principles for two-­‐dimensional garment blanks are no longer relevant. The most crucial aspect of the design process is the programming of the garment, from which designers are generally excluded. The complexity of the programming has led to manufacturers creating wizard-­‐based functions that simplify and speed up the process, and produce standardised garment styles. The database of pre‐programmed garment styles has been held responsible for uniformity of garment silhouettes within the commercial fashion industry. This research develops a craft theory, that has broadly developed from David Pye and Peter Dormer’s seminal work up to the 1990s, and locates it in relation to more contemporary work on digital craft. Programming is acknowledged as a form of digital craft and the Shima Seiki APEX CAD system and SWG-­‐N knitting machine are the craft tools. The creative experimental practice explores the possibilities of taking control of the programming and knitting of seamless garments, in terms of the creative design development of new seamless sleeve head styles. The practice is carried out within an 'experimental system' away from the constraints of industry. The data from semi-­‐structured interviews with commercial knitwear designers and technicians is discussed in relation to the 'communication bottleneck' identified by Claudia Eckert and the 'technology skills gap' identified by Sayer et al. Four scenarios for the design and manufacture of knitwear are identified and analysed in terms of the creative management of the design and sampling of seamless garments. The outcomes reflect on how the roles of designer and technician could be more interchangeable to better exploit seamless knitting technology. Concurrent design practices are considered in the light of a new slow fashion framework that exploits the new possibilities afforded by seamless knitting technology. This study presents the case that the design and technical aspects of knitwear design need to be reunited in order to create innovative seamless garments, and that this could either be as one role, such as technical designer, or within a design team made up of designer and technician. The artifacts created as part of this research illustrate the possibilities of a designer taking control of the whole process, and are products of a design methodology that incorporates digital tools with traditional design skills. However, it is acknowledged that to fully exploit the software one needs to be an expert craftsman, which, due to the complexity of the software, can take many years to achieve. Therefore, the culture of the knitwear industry needs change to actively encourage and facilitate teamwork, and the training of designers and technicians needs to reflect this change, if seamless knitting technology is to be fully exploited

Quasi-Modal Encounters Of The Third Kind: The Filling-In Of Visual Detail

Although Pessoa et al. imply that many aspects of the filling-in debate may be displaced by a regard for active vision, they remain loyal to naive neural reductionist explanations of certain pieces of psychophysical evidence. Alternative interpretations are provided for two specific examples and a new category of filling-in (of visual detail) is proposed