How to Handle Sketch-Abstraction in Sketch-Based Image Retrieval?

In this paper we propose a novel abstraction-aware sketch-based image retrieval framework capable of handling sketch abstraction at varied levels. Prior works had mainly focused on tackling sub-factors such as drawing style and order we instead attempt to model abstraction as a whole and propose feature-level and retrieval granularity-level designs so that the system builds into its DNA the necessary means to interpret abstraction. On learning abstraction-aware features we for the first-time harness the rich semantic embedding of pre-trained StyleGAN model together with a novel abstraction-level mapper that deciphers the level of abstraction and dynamically selects appropriate dimensions in the feature matrix correspondingly to construct a feature matrix embedding that can be freely traversed to accommodate different levels of abstraction. For granularity-level abstraction understanding we dictate that the retrieval model should not treat all abstraction-levels equally and introduce a differentiable surrogate Acc.@q loss to inject that understanding into the system. Different to the gold-standard triplet loss our Acc.@q loss uniquely allows a sketch to narrow/broaden its focus in terms of how stringent the evaluation should be - the more abstract a sketch the less stringent (higher q). Extensive experiments depict our method to outperform existing state-of-the-arts in standard SBIR tasks along with challenging scenarios like early retrieval forensic sketch-photo matching and style-invariant retrieval.