Query-adaptive shape topic mining for hand-drawn sketch recognition

In this work, we study the problem of hand-drawn sketch recognition. Due to large intra-class variations presented in hand-drawn sketches, most of existing work was limited to a particular domain or limited pre-defined classes. Different from existing work, we target at developing a general sketch recognition system, to recognize any semantically meaningful object that a child can recognize. To increase the recognition coverage, a web-scale clipart image collection is leveraged as the knowledge base of the recognition system. To alleviate the problems of intra-class shape variation and inter-class shape ambiguity in this unconstrained situation, a query-adaptive shape topic model is proposed to mine object topics and shape topics related to the sketch, in which, multiple layers of information such as sketch, object, shape, image, and semantic labels are modeled in a generative process. Besides sketch recognition, the proposed topic model can also be used for related applications such as sketch tagging, image tagging, and sketch-based image search. Extensive experiments on different applications show the effectiveness of the proposed topic model and the recognition system.