Semantically Tied Paired Cycle Consistency for Zero-Shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this recordZero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) is an emerging task in computer vision, allowing to retrieve natural images relevant to sketch queries that might not been seen in the training phase. Existing works either require aligned sketch-image pairs or inefficient memory fusion layer for mapping the visual information to a semantic space. In this work, we propose a semantically aligned paired cycle-consistent generative (SEM-PCYC) model for zero-shot SBIR, where each branch maps the visual information to a common semantic space via an adversarial training. Each of these branches maintains a cycle consistency that only requires supervision at category levels, and avoids the need of highly-priced aligned sketch-image pairs. A classification criteria on the generators' outputs ensures the visual to semantic space mapping to be discriminating. Furthermore, we propose to combine textual and hierarchical side information via a feature selection auto-encoder that selects discriminating side information within a same end-to-end model. Our results demonstrate a significant boost in zero-shot SBIR performance over the state-of-the-art on the challenging Sketchy and TU-Berlin datasets.European Union Horizon 202

Cross-Modal Hierarchical Modelling for Fine-Grained Sketch Based Image Retrieval

Sketch as an image search query is an ideal alternative to text in capturing the fine-grained visual details. Prior successes on fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) have demonstrated the importance of tackling the unique traits of sketches as opposed to photos, e.g., temporal vs. static, strokes vs. pixels, and abstract vs. pixel-perfect. In this paper, we study a further trait of sketches that has been overlooked to date, that is, they are hierarchical in terms of the levels of detail -- a person typically sketches up to various extents of detail to depict an object. This hierarchical structure is often visually distinct. In this paper, we design a novel network that is capable of cultivating sketch-specific hierarchies and exploiting them to match sketch with photo at corresponding hierarchical levels. In particular, features from a sketch and a photo are enriched using cross-modal co-attention, coupled with hierarchical node fusion at every level to form a better embedding space to conduct retrieval. Experiments on common benchmarks show our method to outperform state-of-the-arts by a significant margin.Comment: Accepted for ORAL presentation in BMVC 202