Recognizing text through sound alone.

Paper
Li, Wenzhe, and Tracy Anne Hammond. "Recognizing text through sound alone." Twenty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2011.
Direct Link: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI11/paper/download/3791/4119

Summary

This paper introduces a novel approach to sketch recognition using the sound profile of a sketch drawn by scratching on a surface. The authors combine time domain features (mean amplitude) with frequency domain features (Mel-Frequency cepstral coefficients) from the sound profile, after pre-processing to achieve 80% recognition accuracy on recognizing letters in the alphabet sketched out in a constrained manner.

Discussion

Pros

The work is quite novel. I believe GoogleX came up with an idea that is somewhat similar to this one, using similar properties of surface interaction as input for android.

Cons.

The input is constrained to a given surface and a given user.

The input is also constrained to letters drawn out a specific way.

Some of these constraints can be overcome. The authors did not provide metrics on performance without these constraints so the reader can get a sense of how much improvement was gained as a result of so many constraints.