mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Unsupervised Sketch-to-Photo Synthesis

arXiv 1909.08313 ↗First posted 18 Sep 2019cs.CVcited by 38

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Abstract (arXiv)

Humans can envision a realistic photo given a free-hand sketch that is not only spatially imprecise and geometrically distorted but also without colors and visual details. We study unsupervised sketch-to-photo synthesis for the first time, learning from unpaired sketch-photo data where the target photo for a sketch is unknown during training. Existing works only deal with style change or spatial deformation alone, synthesizing photos from edge-aligned line drawings or transforming shapes within the same modality, e.g., color images. Our key insight is to decompose unsupervised sketch-to-photo synthesis into a two-stage translation task: First shape translation from sketches to grayscale photos and then content enrichment from grayscale to color photos. We also incorporate a self-supervised denoising objective and an attention module to handle abstraction and style variations that are inherent and specific to sketches. Our synthesis is sketch-faithful and photo-realistic to enable sketch-based image retrieval in practice. An exciting corollary product is a universal and promising sketch generator that captures human visual perception beyond the edge map of a photo.

Key facts. Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2019.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 8; 2022: 6; 2023: 9; 2024: 13; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.

38 papers.

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  1. 2023DiffSketcher: Text Guided Vector Sketch Synthesis through Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 54
  2. 2022Adaptively-Realistic Image Generation from Stroke and Sketch with Diffusion Modelcited by 39
  3. 2023Picture that Sketch: Photorealistic Image Generation from Abstract Sketchescited by 34
  4. 2024It's All About Your Sketch: Democratising Sketch Control in Diffusion Modelscited by 28
  5. 2022Sketching without Worrying: Noise-Tolerant Sketch-Based Image Retrievalcited by 27
  6. 2021AniGAN: Style-Guided Generative Adversarial Networks for Unsupervised Anime Face Generationcited by 25
  7. 2021Adversarial Open Domain Adaptation for Sketch-to-Photo Synthesiscited by 24
  8. 2021SketchLattice: Latticed Representation for Sketch Manipulationcited by 19
  9. 2023Sketch2Saliency: Learning to Detect Salient Objects from Human Drawingscited by 17
  10. 2023DiffSketching: Sketch Control Image Synthesis with Diffusion Modelscited by 10
  11. 2024How to Handle Sketch-Abstraction in Sketch-Based Image Retrieval?cited by 10
  12. 2021One Sketch for All: One-Shot Personalized Sketch Segmentationcited by 9
26 more
  1. 2021Deep Image Synthesis from Intuitive User Input: A Review and Perspectivescited by 8
  2. 2024Block and Detail: Scaffolding Sketch-to-Image Generationcited by 8
  3. 2024Freehand Sketch Generation from Mechanical Componentscited by 8
  4. 2022Paint2Pix: Interactive Painting based Progressive Image Synthesis and Editingcited by 6
  5. 2024DAVINCI: A Single-Stage Architecture for Constrained CAD Sketch Inferencecited by 6
  6. 2024LineArt: A Knowledge-guided Training-free High-quality Appearance Transfer for Design Drawing with Diffusion Modelcited by 5
  7. 2022Unsupervised Scene Sketch to Photo Synthesiscited by 4
  8. 2021ACNet: Approaching-and-Centralizing Network for Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrievalcited by 3
  9. 2023Improving Sketch Colorization using Adversarial Segmentation Consistencycited by 3
  10. 2024CraftSVG: Multi-Object Text-to-SVG Synthesis via Layout Guided Diffusioncited by 3
  11. 2024Locally-Focused Face Representation for Sketch-to-Image Generation Using Noise-Induced Refinementcited by 3
  12. 2021Adversarial Segmentation Loss for Sketch Colorizationcited by 2
  13. 2023Inversion-by-Inversion: Exemplar-based Sketch-to-Photo Synthesis via Stochastic Differential Equations without Trainingcited by 2
  14. 2024U-Sketch: An Efficient Approach for Sketch to Image Diffusion Modelscited by 2
  15. 2021Adversarial Open Domain Adaption Framework (AODA): Sketch-to-Photo Synthesiscited by 1
  16. 2022Style-Content Disentanglement in Language-Image Pretraining Representations for Zero-Shot Sketch-to-Image Synthesiscited by 1
  17. 2022Towards Practicality of Sketch-Based Visual Understandingcited by 1
  18. 2024HAIFIT: Human-to-AI Fashion Image Translationcited by 1
  19. 2026SketchingReality: From Freehand Scene Sketches To Photorealistic Imagescited by 1
  20. 2023Text-Guided Scene Sketch-to-Photo Synthesiscited by 0
  21. 2023Customize StyleGAN with One Hand Sketchcited by 0
  22. 2023CLIPDraw++: Text-to-Sketch Synthesis with Simple Primitivescited by 0
  23. 2024Content-Conditioned Generation of Stylized Free hand Sketchescited by 0
  24. 2024SketchDeco: Training-Free Latent Composition for Precise Sketch Colourisationcited by 0
  25. 2024Cross-Spectral Attention for Unsupervised RGB-IR Face Verification and Person Re-identificationcited by 0
  26. 2025FedGAI: Federated Style Learning with Cloud-Edge Collaboration for Generative AI in Fashion Designcited by 0