Abstract:
Drawing tests have been long used by practitioners and researchers for early detection of
psychological and neurological impairments. These tests allow subjects to naturally express
themselves as opposed to an interview or a written assessment. Bender Gestalt Test (BGT)
is a well-known and established neurological test designed to detect signs of perceptual
distortions. Subjects are shown a number of geometric patterns for reconstruction and
assessments are made by observing properties like rotation, angulations, simplification
and closure difficulty. The manual scoring of the test, however, is a time consuming and
lengthy procedure especially when a large number of subjects is to be analysed. This paper
proposes the application of image analysis techniques to automatically score a subset of
hand drawn images in the BGT test. A comparison of the scores reported by the automated
system with those assigned by the psychologists not only reveals the effectiveness of the
proposed system but also reflects the huge research potential this area possesses.
