193 research outputs found
Doodle to Search: Practical Zero-Shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval
In this paper, we investigate the problem of zero-shot sketch-based image
retrieval (ZS-SBIR), where human sketches are used as queries to conduct
retrieval of photos from unseen categories. We importantly advance prior arts
by proposing a novel ZS-SBIR scenario that represents a firm step forward in
its practical application. The new setting uniquely recognizes two important
yet often neglected challenges of practical ZS-SBIR, (i) the large domain gap
between amateur sketch and photo, and (ii) the necessity for moving towards
large-scale retrieval. We first contribute to the community a novel ZS-SBIR
dataset, QuickDraw-Extended, that consists of 330,000 sketches and 204,000
photos spanning across 110 categories. Highly abstract amateur human sketches
are purposefully sourced to maximize the domain gap, instead of ones included
in existing datasets that can often be semi-photorealistic. We then formulate a
ZS-SBIR framework to jointly model sketches and photos into a common embedding
space. A novel strategy to mine the mutual information among domains is
specifically engineered to alleviate the domain gap. External semantic
knowledge is further embedded to aid semantic transfer. We show that, rather
surprisingly, retrieval performance significantly outperforms that of
state-of-the-art on existing datasets that can already be achieved using a
reduced version of our model. We further demonstrate the superior performance
of our full model by comparing with a number of alternatives on the newly
proposed dataset. The new dataset, plus all training and testing code of our
model, will be publicly released to facilitate future researchComment: Oral paper in CVPR 201
Progressive Domain-Independent Feature Decomposition Network for Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval
Zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR) is a specific cross-modal
retrieval task for searching natural images given free-hand sketches under the
zero-shot scenario. Most existing methods solve this problem by simultaneously
projecting visual features and semantic supervision into a low-dimensional
common space for efficient retrieval. However, such low-dimensional projection
destroys the completeness of semantic knowledge in original semantic space, so
that it is unable to transfer useful knowledge well when learning semantic from
different modalities. Moreover, the domain information and semantic information
are entangled in visual features, which is not conducive for cross-modal
matching since it will hinder the reduction of domain gap between sketch and
image. In this paper, we propose a Progressive Domain-independent Feature
Decomposition (PDFD) network for ZS-SBIR. Specifically, with the supervision of
original semantic knowledge, PDFD decomposes visual features into domain
features and semantic ones, and then the semantic features are projected into
common space as retrieval features for ZS-SBIR. The progressive projection
strategy maintains strong semantic supervision. Besides, to guarantee the
retrieval features to capture clean and complete semantic information, the
cross-reconstruction loss is introduced to encourage that any combinations of
retrieval features and domain features can reconstruct the visual features.
Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our PDFD over
state-of-the-art competitors
Deep Learning for Free-Hand Sketch: A Survey
Free-hand sketches are highly illustrative, and have been widely used by
humans to depict objects or stories from ancient times to the present. The
recent prevalence of touchscreen devices has made sketch creation a much easier
task than ever and consequently made sketch-oriented applications increasingly
popular. The progress of deep learning has immensely benefited free-hand sketch
research and applications. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the
deep learning techniques oriented at free-hand sketch data, and the
applications that they enable. The main contents of this survey include: (i) A
discussion of the intrinsic traits and unique challenges of free-hand sketch,
to highlight the essential differences between sketch data and other data
modalities, e.g., natural photos. (ii) A review of the developments of
free-hand sketch research in the deep learning era, by surveying existing
datasets, research topics, and the state-of-the-art methods through a detailed
taxonomy and experimental evaluation. (iii) Promotion of future work via a
discussion of bottlenecks, open problems, and potential research directions for
the community.Comment: This paper is accepted by IEEE TPAM
Generalising Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval
Fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) addresses matching specific photo instance using free-hand sketch as a query modality. Existing models aim to learn an embedding space in which sketch and photo can be directly compared. While successful, they require instance-level pairing within each coarse-grained category as annotated training data. Since the learned embedding space is
domain-specific, these models do not generalise well across categories. This limits the practical applicability of FGSBIR. In this paper, we identify cross-category generalisation for FG-SBIR as a domain generalisation problem, and propose the first solution. Our key contribution is a novel unsupervised learning approach to model a universal manifold of prototypical visual sketch traits. This manifold can then be used to paramaterise the learning of a sketch/photo representation. Model adaptation to novel categories then becomes automatic via embedding the novel sketch in the manifold and updating the representation and retrieval function accordingly. Experiments on the two largest FG-SBIR datasets, Sketchy and QMUL-Shoe-V2, demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in enabling crosscategory generalisation of FG-SBIR
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