Abstract: Recognizing input items in an application interface is a basis of automatic GUI test data generation. How to get information of input items in existing interface depends on the information provided by the system of the object under test. They cannot be used under non-intrusive scenarios. This paper proposes a non-intrusive GUI input item recognition method based on visual features. The method detects input items in a GUI interface from GUI images obtained from sources like external cameras. It first uses line detection and contour detection algorithms to obtain a list of candidate input items, then uses support vector machine (SVM) to determine which of these candidates are real input items based on visual features. The method does not rely on the underlying system of the target under test. Experimental results show that it can recognize the input items in a GUI interface with a good accuracy and hence is of effectiveness.

Key words: test data, input item recognition, visual feature, non-intrusive testing