Papers › On Learning Semantic Representations for Million-Scale Free-Hand Sketches
On Learning Semantic Representations for Million-Scale Free-Hand Sketches
Peng Xu, Yongye Huang, Tongtong Yuan, Tao Xiang, Timothy M. Hospedales, Yi-Zhe Song, Liang Wang
In this paper, we study learning semantic representations for million-scale free-hand sketches. This is highly challenging due to the domain-unique traits of sketches, e.g., diverse, sparse, abstract, noisy. We propose a dual-branch CNNRNN network architecture to represent sketches, which simultaneously encodes both the static and temporal patterns of sketch strokes. Based on this architecture, we further explore learning the sketch-oriented semantic representations in two challenging yet practical settings, i.e., hashing retrieval and zero-shot recognition on million-scale sketches. Specifically, we use our dual-branch architecture as a universal representation framework to design two sketch-specific deep models: (i) We propose a deep hashing model for sketch retrieval, where a novel hashing loss is specifically designed to accommodate both the abstract and messy traits of sketches. (ii) We propose a deep embedding model for sketch zero-shot recognition, via collecting a large-scale edge-map dataset and proposing to extract a set of semantic vectors from edge-maps as the semantic knowledge for sketch zero-shot domain alignment. Both deep models are evaluated by comprehensive experiments on million-scale sketches and outperform the state-of-the-art competitors.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Datasets
Introduced by this paper, per the archive.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections