Draw This, an AI-Infused Instant “Camera” That Draws Cartoons

For the past hundred years or so, if you wanted to preserve a moment in time, you would take out a film camera, snap a shot, and develop the resulting image. Now well into the 21st century, the vast majority of photos are digital, but there’s still something nice about being able to hold a physical picture in your hand, or even mount it on the wall.

Of course you can print these photos, but that requires you dusting off your paper printer or sending it to a drug store for development. What about an instant physical copy? It would seem that using a small thermal printer, we could go back to the time instant prints were just a click of a Polaroid camera away.

While certainly possible, Dan Macnish’s take on this concept, called “Draw This,” injects AI computer vision into the mix. It uses a Raspberry Pi camera to take an image, then the Pi interprets what it saw using pre-trained models from Google. Finally, it reproduces what it thinks it saw using the Quick, Draw dataset.

The results are a look into the current state of computer vision processing, producing images that are occasionally accurate-ish, but with surprises, such as being “photobombed by a goat.” While it might not be good for recordkeepking, at least it’s guaranteed to be entertaining. Code is available on GitHub if you’d like to try it yourself.