Computer Vision and Mathematical Methods Used to Analyse Children’s Drawings of God(s)

Abstract In contrast to mainstream research methods in psychology, the project Children’s Drawings of Gods encompasses computer vision and mathematical methods to analyse the data (drawings and drawing annotations). The first part of the present work describes a set of methods designed to extract measures, namely features, directly from the drawings and from annotations of the images. Then, the dissimilarities between the drawings are computed based on particular features (such as the gravity centre of the smallest image unit, namely pixel, or the annotated position of god) and combined in order to measure numerically the differences between the drawings. In the second part, we conduct an exploratory data analysis based on these dissimilarities, including multidimensional scaling and clustering, in order to determine whether the chosen features permit us to distinguish the different strategies that the children used to draw god.