Now, a robot that can draw life-like portraits

London, Apr 2 (ANI): Always regretted not being able to draw well in that art class, well a robot can now give you a tip or two for making those perfect portraits.

Created by Frederic Fol Leymarie and Patrick Tresset, computer scientists at Goldsmiths, University of London, Aikon, the robot works on an algorithm, which would enable it to approximate drawing steps once its camera has detected a face.

Aikon completes its sketches in one go, but Leymarie has said that feedback mechanisms will be built into future models to allow the robot to modify a sketch as it draws, as a human would.

Research in visual perception is moving fast and should help make Aikon more sophisticated.

A team at Yeshiva University in New York have found that a person's eyes move in a much more precise manner when drawing an object than when simply looking at it.

Meanwhile, differences in the cognitive processes used by artists and non-artists are being investigated at Camberwell College of Arts in London using functional MRI brain scans.

"[Our] focus of attention is very important when we draw. We hope to incorporate recent research results into the robot in the next two years," New Scientist quoted Tresset as saying.

The team hopes that by tweaking their software they will gradually reveal the fundamental components of creativity.

But researchers are wondering if creativity could be programmed or not.

"Art is as much about the concept and the observer as it is about technique. A difficult question remains: can a machine recognise art?" said Leymarie. (ANI)