PPTLens: Create Digital Objects with Sketch Images

In this work, we introduce the PPTLens system to convert sketch images captured by smart phones to digital flowcharts in PowerPoint. Different from existing sketch recognition system, which is based on hand-drawn strokes, PPTLens enables users to use sketch images as inputs directly. It's more challenging since strokes extracted from sketch images might not only be very messy, but also without temporal information of the drawings. To implement the 'Image to Object' (I2O) scenario, we propose a novel sketch image recognition framework, including an effective stroke extraction strategy and a novel offline sketch parsing algorithm. By enabling sketch images as inputs, our system makes flowchart/diagram production much more convenient and easier.