UK artist's robot that can sketch a face from a complex mix of lines

Giving tough competition to the legendary artist Leonardo da Vinci is a robot that can sketch a face from a complex mix of lines.

Artist Patrick Tresset has trained the robot, which sketches the faces based on his own drawing skills.

The project named AIKON-II has garnered lot of media attention in the last one year and was even presented at the ‘Kinetica art fair’ in London where it drew over a hundred faces.

Tresset is collaborating with Prof Frederic Fol Leymarie of Goldsmiths, University of London, on the project.

The robot has ‘eyes’ linked to an artificial mind, which imperfectly simulates a small part of Tresset's abilities.

"Even if still partial, the accumulated knowledge about our perceptual and other neurobiological systems is advanced enough that, together with recent progress in computational hardware, computer vision and artificial intelligence, we can now try to build sophisticated computational simulations of at least some of the identifiable perceptual and cognitive processes involved in face sketching by artists," the Daily Mail quoted Professor Frederic Fol Leymarie, from University of London as saying.

According to Leymarie, the system has always been very limited by its lack of 'awareness' of what it was drawing and the next step being worked on by Tresset and him is to tweak the machine so that it can think for itself and draw in its own style.