is it possible to recognise the subject of a simple childlike drawing from a scan or photograph?

I am developing a study for child psychology and would need to analyse thousands of childrens drawings, I would like to automate where possible through edge tracin开发者_运维知识库g etc. to guess the content of the picture comparing it to a library of objects... sun, house, tree, dog, etc. is it possible?

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Pattern recognition is one of the most difficult things to do with computers. If you are asking if there is a ready made solution for this, then the answer is likely no.

That's not to say it can't be done, but it would represent a significant research project and a comprehensive solution would likely advance the field of pattern recognition greatly.

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Personally I think this would be best solved by crowdsourcing it. You scan the images at an appropriate resolution and invite the public to choose keywords or enter their best guess at the subject. The most often chosen subjects will probably be correct and you can then conduct frequency studies or whatever other studies you need. While not directly answering your question about computer-based recognition of the drawings, this would be one way you can get the job done.

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Amazon Mechanical Turk would let you do this easily for a small price. Mechanical Turk lets you "farm out" tasks to people and pay them small fees for the work they do. The fee you pay is based on how much you want to spend and how difficult the work is.

Here is the Wikipedia page that describes more about how mechanical turk works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk

Here is the Amazon Mechanical Turk web page: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome