# Machine Learning-Based Prototyping of Graphical User Interfaces for Mobile Apps

> ReDraw turns screenshots or design mock-ups into native Android GUI prototypes by detecting components, classifying widget types with a CNN, and assembling a plausible view hierarchy with a data-driven nearest-neighbor method.

- Authors: Kevin Moran; Carlos Bernal-Cárdenas; Michael Curcio; Richard Bonett; Denys Poshyvanyk
- Venue: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- Status: Journal article
- Publication / posting date: February 2020
- Date source: Publisher-deposited print issue date in Crossref (2020-02-01), represented at month precision.
- First arXiv submission: February 7, 2018
- arXiv: 1802.02312
- Reviewed arXiv version: v2
- DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2018.2844788
- Sources reviewed: 2026-10-16
- Added to the catalog: 2026-10-17
- Original paper: <https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2018.2844788>
- PDF: <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.02312v2>
- Project: <https://www.android-dev-tools.com/redraw>
- BibTeX: <https://awesomerea.org/papers/citations/paper-redraw.bib>
- Catalog page: <https://awesomerea.org/papers/paper-redraw/>
- Record JSON: <https://awesomerea.org/papers/paper-redraw/record.json>
- Chinese version: [简体中文](https://awesomerea.org/zh/papers/paper-redraw/index.md)

## Scope and limitations

The implementation covers 15 Android component classes and one screen at a time; multiple screens require manual combination, and hierarchy construction is tied to the mined screen size. Evaluation concerns appearance and view hierarchy, not recovery of original app logic or backends. Screenshots and reconstructed mock-ups served as proxies for real design artifacts.

## Why it fits this collection

Adds a data-driven foundation for recovering native widget types and plausible structure from pixels, complementing the existing REMAUI entry.

## Publication and review notes

IEEE TSE 46(2), pages 196–221, February 2020. The author-hosted accepted manuscript and arXiv v2 are dated 2018; ESEC/FSE 2018 was a journal-first presentation, not the journal publication. Crossref creation on 2018-06-07 is a deposit date, not an independently verified online publication date. The author project page describes a rewritten implementation as forthcoming in Winter 2020; no original code repository was verified. The separately archived ReDraw dataset is dated 2019-01-02 (Zenodo 2530277).

## Primary sources

1. <https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1109/TSE.2018.2844788>
2. <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8374985>
3. <https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02312>
4. <https://arxiv.org/html/1802.02312v2>
5. <https://www.cs.wm.edu/~denys/pubs/TSE%2718-ReDraw.pdf>
6. <https://www.android-dev-tools.com/redraw>
7. <https://2018.fseconference.org/details/fse-2018-Journal-First/3/Machine-Learning-Based-Prototyping-of-Graphical-User-Interfaces-for-Mobile-Apps>
8. <https://zenodo.org/records/2530277>
9. <https://zenodo.org/api/records/2530277>

## About this entry

Reviewed against the paper and its primary sources. Cite the original authors using the linked paper or BibTeX.
Original editorial content: MIT. Linked projects, papers and assets retain their own rights and licenses.