Edgel index for large-scale sketch-based image search

  • Authors:

  • Yang Cao; Changhu Wang; Liqing Zhang; Lei Zhang

  • Affiliations:

  • MOE-Microsoft Key Lab. for Intell. Comput. & Intell. Syst., Shanghai Jiao Tong Univ., Shanghai, China;Microsoft Res. Asia, Beijing, China;MOE-Microsoft Key Lab. for Intell. Comput. & Intell. Syst., Shanghai Jiao Tong Univ., Shanghai, China;Microsoft Res. Asia, Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • CVPR '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Retrieving images to match with a hand-drawn sketch query is a highly desired feature, especially with the popularity of devices with touch screens. Although query-by-sketch has been extensively studied since 1990s, it is still very challenging to build a real-time sketch-based image search engine on a large-scale database due to the lack of effective and efficient matching/indexing solutions. The explosive growth of web images and the phenomenal success of search techniques have encouraged us to revisit this problem and target at solving the problem of web-scale sketch-based image retrieval. In this work, a novel index structure and the corresponding raw contour-based matching algorithm are proposed to calculate the similarity between a sketch query and natural images, and make sketch-based image retrieval scalable to millions of images. The proposed solution simultaneously considers storage cost, retrieval accuracy, and efficiency, based on which we have developed a real-time sketch-based image search engine by indexing more than 2 million images. Extensive experiments on various retrieval tasks (basic shape search, specific image search, and similar image search) show better accuracy and efficiency than state-of-the-art methods.