107 accepted papers
Sketch-based caricature synthesis suffers from a fundamental failure mode: when identity and shape conditions are combined in diffusion models, they create destructive interference that causes inevitable collapse toward either bland portraits or unrecognizable distortions. We identify the root cause
The advancement of Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents has enabled automated task processing through reasoning and tool invocation capabilities. However, existing frameworks often operate under the idealized assumption that tool executions are invariably successful, relying solely on textual d…
Reconstructing dynamic visual experiences from brain activity provides a compelling avenue for exploring the neural mechanisms of human visual perception. While recent progress in fMRI-based image reconstruction has been notable, extending this success to video reconstruction remains a significant c
We introduce SketchDeco, a training-free approach to sketch colourisation that bridges the gap between professional design needs and intuitive, region-based control. Our method empowers artists to use simple masks and colour palettes for precise spatial and chromatic specification, avoiding both the
Sketching represents humanity's most intuitive form of visual expression -- a universal language that transcends barriers. Although recent diffusion models integrate sketches with text, they often regard the complete sketch merely as a static visual constraint, neglecting the human preference inform…
We present CaricatureBooth, a system that transforms caricature creation into a simple interactive experience -- as easy as using a photo booth! A key challenge in caricature generation is two-fold: the scarcity of high-quality caricature data and the difficulty in enabling precise creative control…
Keypoint detection, integral to modern machine perception, faces challenges in few-shot learning, particularly when source data from the same distribution as the query is unavailable. This gap is addressed by leveraging sketches, a popular form of human expression, providing a source-free alternativ…
Sketch animations offer a powerful medium for visual storytelling, from simple flip-book doodles to professional studio productions. While traditional animation requires teams of skilled artists to draw key frames and in-between frames, existing automation attempts still demand significant artistic…
Recent work shows that features from Stable Diffusion (SD) and contrastively pretrained models like DINO can be directly used for zero-shot semantic correspondence via naive feature concatenation. In this paper, we explore the stronger potential of Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3), a rectified flow-based mo…
We introduce NitroFusion, a fundamentally different approach to single-step diffusion that achieves high-quality generation through a dynamic adversarial framework. While one-step methods offer dramatic speed advantages, they typically suffer from quality degradation compared to their multi-step cou…
Negative guidance -- explicitly suppressing unwanted attributes -- remains a fundamental challenge in diffusion models, particularly in few-step sampling regimes. While Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) works well in standard settings, it fails under aggressive sampling step compression due to divergen…
As sketch research has collectively matured over time, its adaptation for at-mass commercialisation emerges on the immediate horizon. Despite an already mature research endeavour for photos, there is no research on the efficient inference specifically designed for sketch data. In this paper, we firs…
While foundation models have revolutionised computer vision, their effectiveness for sketch understanding remains limited by the unique challenges of abstract, sparse visual inputs. Through systematic analysis, we uncover two fundamental limitations: Stable Diffusion (SD) struggles to extract meanin…
Despite the rapid advancements in text-to-image (T2I) synthesis, enabling precise visual control remains a significant challenge. Existing works attempted to incorporate multi-facet controls (text and sketch), aiming to enhance the creative control over generated images. However, our pilot study rev…
In this paper we democratise caricature generation empowering individuals to effortlessly craft personalised caricatures with just a photo and a conceptual sketch. Our objective is to strike a delicate balance between abstraction and identity while preserving the creativity and subjectivity inherent…
High-resolution image generation with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has immense potential but due to the enormous capital investment required for training it is increasingly centralised to a few large corporations and hidden behind paywalls. This paper aims to democratise high-resolutio…
"This paper, for the first time, marries large foundation models with human sketch understanding. We demonstrate what this brings – a paradigm shift in terms of generalised sketch representation learning (e.g., classification). This generalisation happens on two fronts: (i) generalisation across unk…
In this paper we democratise 3D content creation enabling precise generation of 3D shapes from abstract sketches while overcoming limitations tied to drawing skills. We introduce a novel part-level modelling and alignment framework that facilitates abstraction modelling and cross-modal correspondenc…
"In this paper, we delve into the intricate dynamics of Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (FG-SBIR) by addressing a critical yet overlooked aspect – the choice of viewpoint during sketch creation. Unlike photo systems that seamlessly handle diverse views through extensive datasets, sketch sy…
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 fea…
Multimodal foundation models, pre-trained on large-scale data, effectively capture vast amounts of factual and commonsense knowledge. However, these models store all their knowledge within their parameters, requiring increasingly larger models and training data to capture more knowledge. To address…
This paper unravels the potential of sketches for diffusion models addressing the deceptive promise of direct sketch control in generative AI. We importantly democratise the process enabling amateur sketches to generate precise images living up to the commitment of "what you sketch is what you get".…
Vector drawings are innately interactive as they preserve creational cues. Despite this desirable property they remain relatively under explored due to the difficulties in modeling complex vector drawings. This is in part due to the primarily _sequential and auto-regressive nature_ of existing appro…
"This paper propels creative control in generative visual AI by allowing users to “select”. Departing from traditional text or sketch-based methods, we for the first time allow users to choose visual concepts by parts for their creative endeavors. The outcome is fine-grained generation that precisel…
While diffusion models have revolutionized generative AI, their application to human sketch generation, especially in the creation of complex yet concise and recognizable sketches, remains largely unexplored. Existing efforts have primarily focused on vector-based sketches, limiting their ability to…
We propose SketchINR to advance the representation of vector sketches with implicit neural models. A variable length vector sketch is compressed into a latent space of fixed dimension that implicitly encodes the underlying shape as a function of time and strokes. The learned function predicts the xy…
This paper for the first time explores text-to-image diffusion models for Zero-Shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval (ZS-SBIR). We highlight a pivotal discovery: the capacity of text-to-image diffusion models to seamlessly bridge the gap between sketches and photos. This proficiency is underpinned by th…
In this paper we explore the unique modality of sketch for explainability emphasising the profound impact of human strokes compared to conventional pixel-oriented studies. Beyond explanations of network behavior we discern the genuine implications of explainability across diverse downstream sketch-r…
Creating multi-view wire art (MVWA) a static 3D sculpture with diverse interpretations from different viewpoints is a complex task even for skilled artists. In response we present DreamWire an AI system enabling everyone to craft MVWA easily. Users express their vision through text prompts or scribb…
Two primary input modalities prevail in image retrieval: sketch and text. While text is widely used for inter-category retrieval tasks sketches have been established as the sole preferred modality for fine-grained image retrieval due to their ability to capture intricate visual details. In this pape…
3D shape modeling is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and requires years of expertise. To facilitate 3D shape modeling, we propose a 3D shape generation network that takes a 3D VR sketch as a condition. We assume that sketches are created by novices without art training and aim to reconstruct geomet…
Current fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) models are isolated. In practice, we first need to identify the coarse-grained label of an object, then select the corresponding FGVC model for recognition. This hinders the application of the FGVC algorithm in real-life scenarios. In this paper, we…
The main challenge for fine-grained few-shot image classification is to learn feature representations with higher inter-class and lower intra-class variations, with a mere few labelled samples. Conventional few-shot learning methods however cannot be naively adopted for this fine-grained setting --…
In this paper, we leverage CLIP for zero-shot sketch based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR). We are largely inspired by recent advances on foundation models and the unparalleled generalisation ability they seem to offer, but for the first time tailor it to benefit the sketch community. We put forward novel…
Generative modelling over continuous-time geometric constructs, a.k.a $chirographic\ data$ such as handwriting, sketches, drawings etc., have been accomplished through autoregressive distributions. Such strictly-ordered discrete factorization however falls short of capturing key properties of chirog…
Controllable person image synthesis aims at rendering a source image based on user-specified changes in body pose or appearance. Prior art approaches leverage pixel-level denoising diffusion models conditioned on the coarse skeleton via cross-attention. This leads to two limitations: low efficiency…
Rising concerns about privacy and anonymity preservation of deep learning models have facilitated research in data-free learning. Primarily based on data-free knowledge distillation, models developed in this area so far have only been able to operate in a single modality, performing the same kind of…
This paper studies the problem of 2D sketch to 3D shape retrieval, but with a focus on democratising the process. We would like this democratisation to happen on two fronts: (i) to remove the need for large-scale specifically sourced 2D sketch and 3D shape datasets, and (ii) to remove restrictions o…
We propose a new formulation of temporal action detection (TAD) with denoising diffusion, DiffTAD in short. Taking as input random temporal proposals, it can yield action proposals accurately given an untrimmed long video. This presents a generative modeling perspective, against previous discriminat…
This paper advances the fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) literature by putting forward a strong baseline that overshoots prior state-of-the art by 11%. This is not via complicated design though, but by addressing two critical issues facing the community (i) the gold standard trip…
In the fashion domain, there exists a variety of vision-and-language (V+L) tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, text-guided image retrieval, multi-modal classification, and image captioning. They differ drastically in each individual input/output format and dataset size. It has been common to des…
Recently, text-guided 3D generative methods have made remarkable advancements in producing high-quality textures and geometry, capitalizing on the proliferation of large vision-language and image diffusion models. However, existing methods still struggle to create high-fidelity 3D head avatars in t…
Although machines have surpassed humans on visual recognition problems, they are still limited to providing closed-set answers. Unlike machines, humans can cognize novel categories at the first observation. Novel category discovery (NCD) techniques, transferring knowledge from seen categories to dis…
The sketch community has faced up to its unique challenges over the years, that of data scarcity however still remains the most significant to date. This lack of sketch data has imposed on the community a few "peculiar" design choices -- the most representative of them all is perhaps the coerced uti…
Given an abstract, deformed, ordinary sketch from untrained amateurs like you and me, this paper turns it into a photorealistic image - just like those shown in Fig. 1(a), all non-cherry-picked. We differ significantly from prior art in that we do not dictate an edgemap-like sketch to start with, bu…
Existing Temporal Action Detection (TAD) methods typically take a pre-processing step in converting an input varying-length video into a fixed-length snippet representation sequence, before temporal boundary estimation and action classification. This pre-processing step would temporally downsample t…
In this paper, we extend scene understanding to include that of human sketch. The result is a complete trilogy of scene representation from three diverse and complementary modalities -- sketch, photo, and text. Instead of learning a rigid three-way embedding and be done with it, we focus on learning…
Human sketch has already proved its worth in various visual understanding tasks (e.g., retrieval, segmentation, image-captioning, etc). In this paper, we reveal a new trait of sketches -- that they are also salient. This is intuitive as sketching is a natural attentive process at its core. More spec…
We show vectorized sketch generation can be identified as a reversal of the stroke deformation process. This relationship was established by means of a diffusion model that learns data distributions over the stroke-point locations and pen states of real human sketches. Given randomly scattered strok…
This paper, for the very first time, introduces human sketches to the landscape of XAI (Explainable Artificial Intelligence). We argue that sketch as a "human-centred" data form, represents a natural interface to study explainability. We focus on cultivating sketch-specific explainability designs. T…
Although existing few-shot learning works yield promising results for in-domain queries, they still suffer from weak cross-domain generalization. Limited support data requires effective knowledge transfer, but domain-shift makes this harder. Towards this emerging challenge, researchers improved adap…
Sketches are highly expressive, inherently capturing subjective and fine-grained visual cues. The exploration of such innate properties of human sketches has, however, been limited to that of image retrieval. In this paper, for the first time, we cultivate the expressiveness of sketches but for the…
This paper studies the problem of zero-short sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR), however with two significant differentiators to prior art (i) we tackle all variants (inter-category, intra-category, and cross datasets) of ZS-SBIR with just one network ("everything"), and (ii) we would really lik…
"The recent focus on Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (FG-SBIR) has shifted towards generalising a model to new categories without any training data from them. In real-world applications, however, a trained FG-SBIR model is often applied to both new categories and different human sketchers,…
The human visual system is remarkable in learning new visual concepts from just a few examples. This is precisely the goal behind few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL), where the emphasis is additionally placed on ensuring the model does not suffer from "forgetting". In this paper, we push the…
"We advance sketch research to scenes with the first dataset of freehand scene sketches, FSCOCO. With practical applications in mind, we collect sketches that convey well scene content but can be sketched within a few minutes by a person with any sketching skills. Our dataset comprises 10,000 freeha…
"Large-scale Vision-and-Language (V+L) pre-training for representation learning has proven to be effective in boosting various downstream V+L tasks. However, when it comes to the fashion domain, existing V+L methods are inadequate as they overlook the unique characteristics of both fashion V+L data…
As lovely as bunnies are, your sketched version would probably not do it justice (Fig. 1). This paper recognises this very problem and studies sketch quality measurement for the first time -- letting you find these badly drawn ones. Our key discovery lies in exploiting the magnitude (L2 norm) of a s…
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been used to tackle the few-shot learning (FSL) problem and shown great potentials under the transductive setting. However under the inductive setting, existing GNN based methods are less competitive. This is because they use an instance GNN as a label propagation/c…
We scrutinise an important observation plaguing scene-level sketch research -- that a significant portion of scene sketches are "partial". A quick pilot study reveals: (i) a scene sketch does not necessarily contain all objects in the corresponding photo, due to the subjective holistic interpretatio…
"Existing temporal action detection (TAD) methods rely on generating an overwhelmingly large number of proposals per video. This leads to complex model designs due to proposal generation and/or per-proposal action instance evaluation and the resultant high computational cost. In this work, for the f…
"Existing temporal action detection (TAD) methods rely on a large number of training data with segment-level annotations. Collecting and annotating such a training set is thus highly expensive and unscalable. Semi-supervised TAD (SS-TAD) alleviates this problem by leveraging unlabeled videos freely…
Zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval typically asks for a trained model to be applied as is to unseen categories. In this paper, we question to argue that this setup by definition is not compatible with the inherent abstract and subjective nature of sketches -- the model might transfer well to new…
Learning meaningful representations for chirographic drawing data such as sketches, handwriting, and flowcharts is a gateway for understanding and emulating human creative expression. Despite being inherently continuous-time data, existing works have treated these as discrete-time sequences, disrega…
"Reconstructing a 3D shape based on a single sketch image is challenging due to the large domain gap between a sparse, irregular sketch and a regular, dense 3D shape. Existing works try to employ the global feature extracted from sketch to directly predict the 3D coordinates, but they usually suffer…
Sketching enables many exciting applications, notably, image retrieval. The fear-to-sketch problem (i.e., "I can't sketch") has however proven to be fatal for its widespread adoption. This paper tackles this "fear" head on, and for the first time, proposes an auxiliary module for existing retrieval…
Image-based virtual try-on aims to fit an in-shop garment into a clothed person image. To achieve this, a key step is garment warping which spatially aligns the target garment with the corresponding body parts in the person image. Prior methods typically adopt a local appearance flow estimation mode…
"Existing temporal action detection (TAD) methods rely on large training data including segment-level annotations, limited to recognizing previously seen classes alone during inference. Collecting and annotating a large training set for each class of interest is costly and hence unscalable. Zero-sho…
Analysis of human sketches in deep learning has advanced immensely through the use of waypoint-sequences rather than raster-graphic representations. We further aim to model sketches as a sequence of low-dimensional parametric curves. To this end, we propose an inverse graphics framework capable of a…
A layout to image (L2I) generation model aims to generate a complicated image containing multiple objects (things) against natural background (stuff), conditioned on a given layout. Built upon the recent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs), recent L2I models have made great progress.…
A lifespan face synthesis (LFS) model aims to generate a set of photo-realistic face images of a person's whole life, given only one snapshot as reference. The generated face image given a target age code is expected to be age-sensitive reflected by bio-plausible transformations of shape and texture…
Although text recognition has significantly evolved over the years, state-of the-art (SOTA) models still struggle in the wild scenarios due to complex backgrounds, varying fonts, uncontrolled illuminations, distortions and other artifacts. This is because such models solely depend on visual informat…
Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) remains a challenging problem to date, largely due to the varying writing styles that exist amongst us. Prior works however generally operate with the assumption that there is a limited number of styles, most of which have already been captured by existing datasets…
A fundamental challenge faced by existing Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (FG-SBIR) models is the data scarcity -- model performances are largely bottlenecked by the lack of sketch-photo pairs. Whilst the number of photos can be easily scaled, each corresponding sketch still needs to be in…
A deep hashing model typically has two main learning objectives: to make the learned binary hash codes discriminative and to minimize a quantization error. With further constraints such as bit balance and code orthogonality, it is not uncommon for existing models to employ a large number (>4) of los…
Perceptual organization remains one of the very few established theories on the human visual system. It underpinned many pre-deep seminal works on segmentation and detection, yet research has seen a rapid decline since the preferential shift to learning deep models. Of the limited attempts, most aim…
A few-shot semantic segmentation model is typically composed of a CNN encoder, a CNN decoder and a simple classifier (separating foreground and background pixels). Most existing methods meta-learn all three model components for fast adaptation to a new class. However, given that as few as a single s…
What makes free-hand sketches appealing for humans lies with its capability as a universal tool to depict the visual world. Such flexibility at human ease, however, introduces abstract renderings that pose unique challenges to computer vision models. In this paper, we propose a purpose-made sketch r…
The key challenge in designing a sketch representation lies with handling the abstract and iconic nature of sketches. Existing work predominantly utilizes either, (i) a pixelative format that treats sketches as natural images employing off-the-shelf CNN-based networks, or (ii) an elaborately designe…
Sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) is a cross-modal matching problem which is typically solved by learning a joint embedding space where the semantic content shared between photo and sketch modalities are preserved. However, a fundamental challenge in SBIR has been largely ignored so far, that is,…
Text recognition remains a fundamental and extensively researched topic in computer vision, largely owing to its wide array of commercial applications. The challenging nature of the very problem however dictated a fragmentation of research efforts: Scene Text Recognition (STR) that deals with text i…
Visual text recognition is undoubtedly one of the most extensively researched topics in computer vision. Great progress have been made to date, with the latest models starting to focus on the more practical "in-the-wild" setting. However, a salient problem still hinders practical deployment -- prior…
Self-supervised learning has gained prominence due to its efficacy at learning powerful representations from unlabelled data that achieve excellent performance on many challenging downstream tasks. However, supervision-free pre-text tasks are challenging to design and usually modality specific. Alth…
Whether what you see in Figure 1 is a "flamingo" or a "bird", is the question we ask in this paper. While fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) strives to arrive at the former, for the majority of us non-experts just "bird" would probably suffice. The real question is therefore -- how can we tai…
Recent encoder-decoder approaches typically employ string decoders to convert images into serialized strings for image-to-markup. However, for tree-structured representational markup, string representations can hardly cope with the structural complexity. In this work, we first show via a set of toy…
The study of neural generative models of human sketches is a fascinating contemporary modeling problem due to the links between sketch image generation and the human drawing process. The landmark SketchRNN provided breakthrough by sequentially generating sketches as a sequence of waypoints. However…
Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) is much more challenging than traditional classification tasks due to the inherently subtle intra-class object variations. Recent works mainly tackle this problem by focusing on how to locate the most discriminative parts, more complementary parts, and parts o…
Fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) addresses the problem of retrieving a particular photo instance given a user's query sketch. Its widespread applicability is however hindered by the fact that drawing a sketch takes time, and most people struggle to draw a complete and faithful ske…
ImageNet pre-training has long been considered crucial by the fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) community due to the lack of large sketch-photo paired datasets for FG-SBIR training. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised alternative for representation pre-training. Specificall…
A common strategy adopted by existing state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods is to employ two classifiers to identify the misaligned local regions between source and target domain. Following the 'wisdom of the crowd' principle, one has to ask: why stop at two? Indeed, we find…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR), where human sketches are used as queries to conduct retrieval of photos from unseen categories. We importantly advance prior arts by proposing a novel ZS-SBIR scenario that represents a firm step forward i…
Domain generalization (DG) is the challenging and topical problem of learning models that generalize to novel testing domains with different statistics than a set of known training domains. The simple approach of aggregating data from all source domains and training a single deep neural network end-…
Fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) addresses matching specific photo instance using free-hand sketch as a query modality. Existing models aim to learn an embedding space in which sketch and photo can be directly compared. While successful, they require instance-level pairing within…
We aim to learn a domain generalizable person re-identification (ReID) model. When such a model is trained on a set of source domains (ReID datasets collected from different camera networks), it can be directly applied to any new unseen dataset for effective ReID without any model updating. Despite…
Automatic data abstraction is an important capability for both benchmarking machine intelligence and supporting summarization applications. In the former one asks whether a machine can `understand' enough about the meaning of input data to produce a meaningful but more compact abstraction. In the la…
Modelling human free-hand sketches has become topical recently, driven by practical applications such as fine-grained sketch based image retrieval (FG-SBIR). Sketches are clearly related to photo edge-maps, but a human free-hand sketch of a photo is not simply a clean rendering of that photo's edge…
Human free-hand sketches have been studied in various contexts including sketch recognition, synthesis and fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR). A fundamental challenge for sketch analysis is to deal with drastically different human drawing styles, particularly in terms of abstraction…
To see is to sketch -- free-hand sketching naturally builds ties between human and machine vision. In this paper, we present a novel approach for translating an object photo to a sketch, mimicking the human sketching process. This is an extremely challenging task because the photo and sketch domains…
Contemporary deep learning techniques have made image recognition a reasonably reliable technology. However training effective photo classifiers typically takes numerous examples which limits image recognition's scalability and applicability to scenarios where images may not be available. This has m…
We propose a deep hashing framework for sketch retrieval that, for the first time, works on a multi-million scale human sketch dataset.Leveraging on this large dataset, we explore a few sketch-specific traits that were otherwise under-studied in prior literature. Instead of following the conventiona…
We contribute the rst large-scale dataset of scene sketches, SketchyScene, with the goal of advancing research on sketch understanding at both the object and scene level. The dataset is created through a novel and carefully designed crowdsourcing pipeline, enabling users to eciently generate large q…
In this work we aim to develop a universal sketch grouper. That is, a grouper that can be applied to sketches of any category in any domain to group constituent strokes/segments into semantically meaningful object parts. The first obstacle to this goal is the lack of large-scale datasets with groupi…
Human sketches are unique in being able to capture both the spatial topology of a visual object, as well as its subtle appearance details. Fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) importantly leverages on such fine-grained characteristics of sketches to conduct instance-level retrieval of…
The problem of domain generalization is to learn from multiple training domains, and extract a domain-agnostic model that can then be applied to an unseen domain. Domain generalization (DG) has a clear motivation in contexts where there are target domains with distinct characteristics, yet sparse da…
We investigate whether it is possible to improve the performance of automated facial forensic sketch matching by learning from examples of facial forgetting over time. Forensic facial sketch recognition is a key capability for law enforcement, but remains an unsolved problem. It is extremely challe…
We investigate the problem of fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR), where free-hand human sketches are used as queries to perform instance-level retrieval of images. This is an extremely challenging task because (i) visual comparisons not only need to be fine-grained but also executed cr…
We propose a perceptual grouping framework that organizes image edges into meaningful structures and demonstrate its usefulness on various computer vision tasks. Our grouper formulates edge grouping as a graph partition problem, where a learning to rank method is developed to encode probabilities of…