Sketch2Diagram: Generating Vector Diagrams from Hand-Drawn Sketches

Abstract

We address the challenge of automatically generating high-quality vector diagrams from hand-drawn sketches. Vector diagrams are essential for communicating complex ideas across various fields, offering flexibility and scalability. While recent research has progressed in generating diagrams from text descriptions, converting hand-drawn sketches into vector diagrams remains largely unexplored due to the lack of suitable datasets. To address this gap, we introduce SketikZ, a dataset comprising 3,231 pairs of hand-drawn sketches and thier corresponding TikZ codes as well as reference diagrams. Our evaluations reveal the limitations of state-of-the-art vision and language models (VLMs), positioning SketikZ as a key benchmark for future research in sketch-to-diagram conversion. Along with SketikZ, we present ImgTikZ, an image-to-TikZ model that integrates a 6.7B parameter code-specialized open-source large language model (LLM) with a pre-trained vision encoder. Despite its relatively compact size, ImgTikZ performs comparably to GPT-4o. This success is driven by using our two data augmentation techniques and a multi-candidate inference strategy. Our findings open promising directions for future research in sketch-to-diagram conversion and broader image-to-code generation tasks. SketikZ is publicly available.