Zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR) is a task of cross-domain image retrieval from a natural image gallery with free-hand sketch under a zero-shot scenario. Previous works mostly focus on a generative approach that takes a highly abstract and sparse sketch as input and then synthesizes the corresponding natural image. However, the intrinsic visual sparsity and large intra-class variance of the sketch make the learning of the conditional decoder more difficult and hence achieve unsatisfactory retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose a novel stacked semantic-guided network to address the unique characteristics of sketches in ZS-SBIR. Specifically, we devise multi-layer feature fusion networks that incorporate different intermediate feature representation information in a deep neural network to alleviate the intrinsic sparsity of sketches. In order to improve visual knowledge transfer from seen to unseen classes, we elaborate a coarse-to-fine conditional decoder that generates coarse-grained category-specific corresponding features first (taking auxiliary semantic information as conditional input) and then generates fine-grained instance-specific corresponding features (taking sketch representation as conditional input). Furthermore, regression loss and classification loss are utilized to preserve the semantic and discriminative information of the synthesized features respectively. Extensive experiments on the large-scale Sketchy dataset and TU-Berlin dataset demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by more than 20 in retrieval performance.
Related SBIR approaches can be roughly categorized into two types: methods based on hand-crafted features and those based on deep-learned features. In the first category, @cite_26 proposed the gradient field HOG descriptor, which is an adaptive form of HOG descriptor suitable for sketches. Histogram of Edge Local Orientations (HELO) @cite_16 utilized soft computation of local orientations and took spatial information into account for SBIR. @cite_37 proposed Learned KeyShapes (LKS) based on mid-level pattern detection. In the second category, the convolutional neural network was first applied for sketch recognition in Sketch-a-Net @cite_48 . @cite_7 used siamese network to pull features closer for corresponding sketch-image pairs and push them away if they belonged to different categories. Furthermore, @cite_5 exploited triplet loss to take full advantage of the relationships between similar and dissimilar samples for fine-grained instance-level SBIR. Deep Sketch Hashing (DSH) @cite_23 proposed a semi-heterogeneous deep architecture with the help of auxiliary sketch-tokens. However, existing methods are not specifically elaborated for ZS-SBIR, meaning that the visual knowledge transfer from seen to unseen classes under a zero-shot setting is neglected.
@cite_37 @cite_26 @cite_7 @cite_48 @cite_23 @cite_5 @cite_16
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Recent studies show that large-scale sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) can be efficiently tackled by cross-modal binary representation learning methods, where Hamming distance matching significantly speeds up the process of similarity search. Providing training and test data subjected to a fixed set of pre-defined categories, the cutting-edge SBIR and cross-modal hashing works obtain acceptable retrieval performance. However, most of the existing methods fail when the categories of query sketches have never been seen during training. In this paper, the above problem is briefed as a novel but realistic zero-shot SBIR hashing task. We elaborate the challenges of this special task and accordingly propose a zero-shot sketch-image hashing (ZSIH) model. An end-to-end three-network architecture is built, two of which are treated as the binary encoders. The third network mitigates the sketch-image heterogeneity and enhances the semantic relations among data by utilizing the Kronecker fusion layer and graph convolution, respectively. As an important part of ZSIH, we formulate a generative hashing scheme in reconstructing semantic knowledge representations for zero-shot retrieval. To the best of our knowledge, ZSIH is the first zero-shot hashing work suitable for SBIR and cross-modal search. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two extended datasets, i.e., Sketchy and TU-Berlin with a novel zero-shot train-test split. The proposed model remarkably outperforms related works. Free-hand sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) is a specific cross-view retrieval task, in which queries are abstract and ambiguous sketches while the retrieval database is formed with natural images. Work in this area mainly focuses on extracting representative and shared features for sketches and natural images. However, these can neither cope well with the geometric distortion between sketches and images nor be feasible for large-scale SBIR due to the heavy continuous-valued distance computation. In this paper, we speed up SBIR by introducing a novel binary coding method, named Deep Sketch Hashing (DSH), where a semi-heterogeneous deep architecture is proposed and incorporated into an end-to-end binary coding framework. Specifically, three convolutional neural networks are utilized to encode free-hand sketches, natural images and, especially, the auxiliary sketch-tokens which are adopted as bridges to mitigate the sketch-image geometric distortion. The learned DSH codes can effectively capture the cross-view similarities as well as the intrinsic semantic correlations between different categories. To the best of our knowledge, DSH is the first hashing work specifically designed for category-level SBIR with an end-to-end deep architecture. The proposed DSH is comprehensively evaluated on two large-scale datasets of TU-Berlin Extension and Sketchy, and the experiments consistently show DSHs superior SBIR accuracies over several state-of-the-art methods, while achieving significantly reduced retrieval time and memory footprint. Sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) is the task of retrieving images from a natural image database that correspond to a given hand-drawn sketch. Ideally, an SBIR model should learn to associate components in the sketch (say, feet, tail, etc.) with the corresponding components in the image having similar shape characteristics. However, current evaluation methods simply focus only on coarse-grained evaluation where the focus is on retrieving images which belong to the same class as the sketch but not necessarily having the same shape characteristics as in the sketch. As a result, existing methods simply learn to associate sketches with classes seen during training and hence fail to generalize to unseen classes. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark for zero-shot SBIR where the model is evaluated on novel classes that are not seen during training. We show through extensive experiments that existing models for SBIR that are trained in a discriminative setting learn only class specific mappings and fail to generalize to the proposed zero-shot setting. To circumvent this, we propose a generative approach for the SBIR task by proposing deep conditional generative models that take the sketch as an input and fill the missing information stochastically. Experiments on this new benchmark created from the “Sketchy” dataset, which is a large-scale database of sketch-photo pairs demonstrate that the performance of these generative models is significantly better than several state-of-the-art approaches in the proposed zero-shot framework of the coarse-grained SBIR task. Human sketches are unique in being able to capture both the spatial topology of a visual object, as well as its subtle appearance details. Fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) importantly leverages on such fine-grained characteristics of sketches to conduct instance-level retrieval of photos. Nevertheless, human sketches are often highly abstract and iconic, resulting in severe misalignments with candidate photos which in turn make subtle visual detail matching difficult. Existing FG-SBIR approaches focus only on coarse holistic matching via deep cross-domain representation learning, yet ignore explicitly accounting for fine-grained details and their spatial context. In this paper, a novel deep FG-SBIR model is proposed which differs significantly from the existing models in that: (1) It is spatially aware, achieved by introducing an attention module that is sensitive to the spatial position of visual details: (2) It combines coarse and fine semantic information via a shortcut connection fusion block: and (3) It models feature correlation and is robust to misalignments between the extracted features across the two domains by introducing a novel higher-order learnable energy function (HOLEF) based loss. Extensive experiments show that the proposed deep spatial-semantic attention model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art.