Automated scoring of Bender Gestalt Test using image analysis techniques

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 analyzed. 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.