A criticism on popular sketch datasets

Abstract

Sketching is a tool that people can use without any training and benefit from when communicating, thinking or keeping records. The wide range of uses of sketching has made it a high-potential, promising research topic for human-computer interaction researchers. The first step for the researchers who were working for this purpose was developing sketch recognition models. However, in order to continue these studies, they needed a large amount of sketch data. Creating these datasets is a costly task. For this reason, the cheapest methods that enable to produce a large number of sketches quickly were preferred in the research. Although the required amount of sketching data has been collected thanks to these methods, it is necessary to question their quality and similarity to the sketches created during daily life interactions. In this article, a critical comparison of the most widely used sketch datasets in the literature with the sketches we create during daily life interactions is made. In addition, a new dataset which consists of sketches that are created during human-human interactions is introduced. The study showed that popular sketch datasets do not reflect the quality of sketches we create in our daily life.