Algısal benzerlik yoluyla serbest formlu çizim sahnelerinin gruplandırılması

Similarity is a fundamental concept in psychology that underlies object recognition, classification and clustering. Psychologists have theorized many explanations for human mind's ability to perceive similarity. Yet, there is still no agreed upon theory, partly because similarity is quite subjective and varies with the features attended by the subject. In this thesis, we explored the concept of similarity for hand-drawn sketches, and address the problem of building a gold standard for assessing similarity and clustering free-form sketch scenes through perceptual similarity. Toward this end, we collected a large dataset consisting of 2400 hand-drawn scenes. We further designed a table-grouping protocol for obtaining a measure of similarity through similarity ratings of human assessors. We verified the validity of the constructed gold standard through inter-rater agreement. We evaluated the performance of the clustering system by measuring the degree of agreement with the constructed gold standard. We obtained high agreement scores, showing that the clustering system operates very similar to human way of grouping sketch scenes.