Query-by-sketch image retrieval using homogeneous painting style characterization
Fei Wang, Shujin Lin, Xiaonan Luo, Baoquan Zhao, Ruomei Wang · Journal of Electronic Imaging · 2019
As an effective and efficient way to graphically portray ideas and concepts, free-hand sketches are playing an increasingly significant role in today’s image retrieval systems. There are many factors that contribute to a successful sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) system, but perhaps the most essential ones are the design of powerful image feature descriptors and effective perceptual similarity metrics in the feature space. However, the painting experiences and styles of users vary hugely, which poses a great challenge for consistently accurate feature representation and matching. We introduce an approach for SBIR by characterizing homogeneous sketch drawing styles. Specifically, given a sketch query, the proposed method first infers the user’s painting style from it by analyzing contour features. Then, top K-nearest sketches of historical users with similar drawing characters are identified from the database. Finally, the matched images of the query can be obtained by reranking those of the K-nearest sketches stored in the historical recordings. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted quantitative comparisons with several peer SBIR methods. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is 15% higher than state-of-the-art in terms of mean average precision.