# Doodle to Search: Practical Zero-Shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03451 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03451/

## Key facts

- Cited by 79 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 79)

- [GAN Inversion: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05278/) (2021)
- [MagicLens: Self-Supervised Image Retrieval with Open-Ended Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19651/) (2024)
- [CLIP for All Things Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval, Fine-Grained or Not](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13440/) (2023)
- [StyleMeUp: Towards Style-Agnostic Sketch-Based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15706/) (2021)
- [Vectorization and Rasterization: Self-Supervised Learning for Sketch and Handwriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13716/) (2021)
- [More Photos are All You Need: Semi-Supervised Learning for Fine-Grained Sketch Based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13990/) (2021)
- [Sketch3T: Test-Time Training for Zero-Shot SBIR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14691/) (2022)
- [SceneTrilogy: On Human Scene-Sketch and its Complementarity with Photo and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11964/) (2022)
- [A Sketch Is Worth a Thousand Words: Image Retrieval with Text and Sketch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03354/) (2022)
- [Sketching without Worrying: Noise-Tolerant Sketch-Based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14817/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Everything Sketch-Based Image Retrieval, and in Explainable Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14348/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Open Domain Adaptation for Sketch-to-Photo Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05703/) (2021)
- [Doodle It Yourself: Class Incremental Learning by Drawing a Few Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14843/) (2022)
- [What Can Human Sketches Do for Object Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15149/) (2023)
- [Cloud2Curve: Generation and Vectorization of Parametric Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15536/) (2021)
- [An Efficient Framework for Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04016/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01723/) (2022)
- [Exploiting Unlabelled Photos for Stronger Fine-Grained SBIR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13779/) (2023)
- [SEVA: Leveraging sketches to evaluate alignment between human and machine visual abstraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03035/) (2023)
- [Domain Disentangled Generative Adversarial Network for Zero-Shot Sketch-Based 3D Shape Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11948/) (2022)
- [How to Handle Sketch-Abstraction in Sketch-Based Image Retrieval?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07203/) (2024)
- [SHREC'22 Track: Sketch-Based 3D Shape Retrieval in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04945/) (2022)
- [BDA-SketRet: Bi-Level Domain Adaptation for Zero-Shot SBIR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06570/) (2022)
- [Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Great Sketch-Photo Matchmakers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07214/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Sketch Based Image Retrieval using Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10185/) (2022)
- [Data-Free Sketch-Based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07775/) (2023)
- [Universal Cross-Domain Retrieval: Generalizing Across Classes and Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08356/) (2021)
- ['CADSketchNet' -- An Annotated Sketch dataset for 3D CAD Model Retrieval with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06212/) (2021)
- [Learning Geometry-aware Representations by Sketching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08204/) (2023)
- [SketchGPT: Autoregressive Modeling for Sketch Generation and Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03099/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 in its practical application. The new setting uniquely recognizes two important yet often neglected challenges of practical ZS-SBIR, (i) the large domain gap between amateur sketch and photo, and (ii) the necessity for moving towards large-scale retrieval. We first contribute to the community a novel ZS-SBIR dataset, QuickDraw-Extended, that consists of 330,000 sketches and 204,000 photos spanning across 110 categories. Highly abstract amateur human sketches are purposefully sourced to maximize the domain gap, instead of ones included in existing datasets that can often be semi-photorealistic. We then formulate a ZS-SBIR framework to jointly model sketches and photos into a common embedding space. A novel strategy to mine the mutual information among domains is specifically engineered to alleviate the domain gap. External semantic knowledge is further embedded to aid semantic transfer. We show that, rather surprisingly, retrieval performance significantly outperforms that of state-of-the-art on existing datasets that can already be achieved using a reduced version of our model. We further demonstrate the superior performance of our full model by comparing with a number of alternatives on the newly proposed dataset. The new dataset, plus all training and testing code of our model, will be publicly released to facilitate future research