Photosketcher: Interactive Sketch-Based Image Synthesis

Figure 1: Photosketcher: realistic images from user sketches using large image collection queries and interactive image compositing. We introduce Photosketcher, an interactive system for progressively synthesizing novel images using only sparse user sketches as the input. Compared to existing approaches for synthesising images from parts of other images, Photosketcher works on the image con-tent exclusively, no keywords or other metadata associated with the images is required. Users sketch the rough shape of a desired im-age part and we automatically search a large collection of images for images containing that part. The search is based on a bag-of-features approach using local descriptors for translation invariant part retrieval. The compositing step again is based on user scrib-bles: from the scribbles we predict the desired part using Gaussian Mixture Models and compute an optimal seam using Graphcut. Op-tionally, Photosketcher lets users blend the composite image in the gradient domain to further reduce visible seams. We demonstrate that the resulting system allows interactive generation of complex images.