Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

skip to main content
10.1145/1622176.1622213acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesuistConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Sikuli: using GUI screenshots for search and automation

Published: 04 October 2009 Publication History

Abstract

We present Sikuli, a visual approach to search and automation of graphical user interfaces using screenshots. Sikuli allows users to take a screenshot of a GUI element (such as a toolbar button, icon, or dialog box) and query a help system using the screenshot instead of the element's name. Sikuli also provides a visual scripting API for automating GUI interactions, using screenshot patterns to direct mouse and keyboard events. We report a web-based user study showing that searching by screenshot is easy to learn and faster to specify than keywords. We also demonstrate several automation tasks suitable for visual scripting, such as map navigation and bus tracking, and show how visual scripting can improve interactive help systems previously proposed in the literature.

Supplementary Material

JPG File (p183-yeh.jpg)
WMV File (p183-yeh.wmv)

References

[1]
St. Amant, R., H. Lieberman, R. Potter, and L. Zettlemoyer. Programming by example: visual generalization in programming by example. Commun. ACM 43(3), 107--114, 2003.
[2]
Bergman, L., V. Castelli, T. Lau, and D. Oblinger. DocWizards: a system for authoring follow-me documentation wizards. Proc. UIST '05, 191--200, 2005.
[3]
Bolin, M., M. Webber, P. Rha, T. Wilson, and R. C. Miller. Automation and customization of rendered web pages. Proc. UIST '05, 163--172, 2005.
[4]
Forsyth, D. and Ponce, J., Computer Vision: A Modern Approach, Prentice Hall, USA, 2002.
[5]
Harrison, S. M. A comparison of still, animated, or nonillustrated on-line help with written or spoken instructions in a graphical user interface. Proc. CHI '95, 82--89, 1995.
[6]
Hoffmann, R., J. Fogarty, and D. S. Weld. Assieme: finding and leveraging implicit references in a web search interface for programmers. Proc. UIST '07, 13--22, 2007.
[7]
Huang, J. and M. B. Twidale. Graphstract: minimal graphical help for computers. Proc. UIST '07, 203--212, 2007.
[8]
Kelleher, C. and R. Pausch. Stencils-based tutorials: design and evaluation. Proc. CHI '05, 541--550, 2005.
[9]
Knabe, K. Apple guide: a case study in user-aided design of online help. Proc. CHI '95, 286--287, 1995.
[10]
Leshed, G., E. M. Haber, T. Matthews, and T. Lau. CoScripter: automating&sharing how-to knowledge in the enterprise. Proc. CHI '08, 1719--1728, 2008.
[11]
Lowe, D. G. Object recognition from local scale-invariant features. Proc. International Conference on Computer Vision, 1150--1157, 1999.
[12]
Matas, J., O. Chum, U. Martin, and T. Pajdla. Robust wide baseline stereo from maximally stable extremal regions. Proc. British Machine Vision Conference '02, 2002.
[13]
Mikolajczyk, K., B. Leibe, and B. Schiele. Multiple object class detection with a generative model. Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition '06, 26--36, 2006.
[14]
Moriyon, R., P. Szekely, and R. Neches. Automatic generation of help from interface design models. Proc. CHI '94, 225--231, 1994.
[15]
Pangoli, S. and F. Paternó. Automatic generation of task-oriented help. Proc. UIST '95, 181--187, 1995.
[16]
Potter, R. L. Pixel data access: interprocess communication in the user interface for end-user programming and graphical macros. Ph.D. thesis, College Park, MD, USA, 1999.
[17]
Prabaker, M., L. Bergman, and V. Castelli. An evaluation of using programming by demonstration and guided walkthrough techniques for authoring and utilizing documentation. Proc. CHI '06, 241--250, 2006.
[18]
Sivic, J. and A. Zisserman. Video Google: A text retrieval approach to object matching in videos. Proc. International Conference on Computer Vision, 2003.
[19]
Sukaviriya, P. and J. D. Foley. Coupling a UI framework with automatic generation of context-sensitive animated help. Proc. UIST '90, 152--166, 1990.
[20]
Zettlemoyer, L. S. and St. Amant, R. A visual medium for programmatic control of interactive applications. Proc. CHI '99, 199--206, 1999.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Enhancement of GUI Display Error Detection Using Improved Faster R-CNN and Multi-Scale Attention MechanismApplied Sciences10.3390/app1403114414:3(1144)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2024
  • (2024)Having Difficulty Understanding Manuals? Automatically Converting User Manuals into Instructional VideosProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36602458:EICS(1-19)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
  • (2024)UIClip: A Data-driven Model for Assessing User Interface DesignProceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3654777.3676408(1-16)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Sikuli: using GUI screenshots for search and automation

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    UIST '09: Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
    October 2009
    278 pages
    ISBN:9781605587455
    DOI:10.1145/1622176
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 04 October 2009

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. automation
    2. image search
    3. online help

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    UIST '09

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)137
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)15
    Reflects downloads up to 12 Nov 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Enhancement of GUI Display Error Detection Using Improved Faster R-CNN and Multi-Scale Attention MechanismApplied Sciences10.3390/app1403114414:3(1144)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2024
    • (2024)Having Difficulty Understanding Manuals? Automatically Converting User Manuals into Instructional VideosProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36602458:EICS(1-19)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
    • (2024)UIClip: A Data-driven Model for Assessing User Interface DesignProceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3654777.3676408(1-16)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Unblind Text Inputs: Predicting Hint-text of Text Input in Mobile Apps via LLMProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642939(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)AQuA: Automated Question-Answering in Software Tutorial Videos with Visual AnchorsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642752(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)DirectGPT: A Direct Manipulation Interface to Interact with Large Language ModelsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642462(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)MUD: Towards a Large-Scale and Noise-Filtered UI Dataset for Modern Style UI ModelingProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642350(1-14)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)On Effectiveness and Efficiency of Gamified Exploratory GUI TestingIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.334803650:2(322-337)Online publication date: Feb-2024
    • (2024)Investigating the robustness of locators in template-based Web application testing using a GUI change classification modelJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111932210:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
    • (2023)Task Automation Intelligent Agents: A ReviewFuture Internet10.3390/fi1506019615:6(196)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Get Access

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media