Researchers have developed a computer can that identify these sketches better than a human

Although artificial neural networks are getting a lot more intelligent very quickly (Google's AI even has incredibly trippy dreams), one limitation has been that most of these systems are designed to recognise photos rather than hand drawings.

But now, a research team at London's Queen Mary University has created a programme that is better at identifying sketches than humans. Popular Science picked up their research paper earlier this week. It was published online in arXiv.

In the study, Sketch-a-Net was able to correctly identify 74.5% of drawings, which is the first time that a machine has surpassed the human sketch recognition benchmark of 73.1%. Training a computer to identify sketches could be useful for online shopping, if a customer wanted to draw out a product and have the database recognise it, or to match police sketches to security footage, researchers said.

Click through the slides to see how researchers trained Sketch-a-Net.