mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Why Do Line Drawings Work? A Realism Hypothesis

arXiv 2002.06260 ↗First posted 14 Feb 2020cs.CV cs.GRcited by 28

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Abstract (arXiv)

Why is it that we can recognize object identity and 3D shape from line drawings, even though they do not exist in the natural world? This paper hypothesizes that the human visual system perceives line drawings as if they were approximately realistic images. Moreover, the techniques of line drawing are chosen to accurately convey shape to a human observer. Several implications and variants of this hypothesis are explored.

Key facts. Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 14 Feb 2020.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 2; 2022: 7; 2023: 6; 2024: 6; 2025: 5; 2026: 2.

28 papers.

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  1. 2022Learning to generate line drawings that convey geometry and semanticscited by 82
  2. 2022CLIPascene: Scene Sketching with Different Types and Levels of Abstractioncited by 63
  3. 2022CLIPasso: Semantically-Aware Object Sketchingcited by 57
  4. 2023Breathing Life Into Sketches Using Text-to-Video Priorscited by 47
  5. 2023Picture that Sketch: Photorealistic Image Generation from Abstract Sketchescited by 34
  6. 2024It's All About Your Sketch: Democratising Sketch Control in Diffusion Modelscited by 28
  7. 2022Doodle It Yourself: Class Incremental Learning by Drawing a Few Sketchescited by 23
  8. 2023What Can Human Sketches Do for Object Detection?cited by 19
  9. 2023Sketch2Saliency: Learning to Detect Salient Objects from Human Drawingscited by 17
  10. 2023Doodle Your 3D: From Abstract Freehand Sketches to Precise 3D Shapescited by 14
  11. 2021Neural Strokes: Stylized Line Drawing of 3D Shapescited by 13
  12. 2024SketchINR: A First Look into Sketches as Implicit Neural Representationscited by 13
16 more
  1. 2022Designing Perceptual Puzzles by Differentiating Probabilistic Programscited by 12
  2. 2023DemoCaricature: Democratising Caricature Generation with a Rough Sketchcited by 10
  3. 2025Multi-Object Sketch Animation with Grouping and Motion Trajectory Priorscited by 9
  4. 2024LineArt: A Knowledge-guided Training-free High-quality Appearance Transfer for Design Drawing with Diffusion Modelcited by 5
  5. 2024What Sketch Explainability Really Means for Downstream Taskscited by 4
  6. 2021The Role of Edges in Line Drawing Perceptioncited by 3
  7. 2024Do Generalised Classifiers really work on Human Drawn Sketches?cited by 2
  8. 2025Recovering Dynamic 3D Sketches from Videoscited by 2
  9. 2025Computational Scaffolding of Composition, Value, and Color for Disciplined Drawingcited by 2
  10. 2022StyLandGAN: A StyleGAN based Landscape Image Synthesis using Depth-mapcited by 1
  11. 2022Towards Practicality of Sketch-Based Visual Understandingcited by 1
  12. 2026Creo: From One-Shot Image Generation to Progressive, Co-Creative Ideationcited by 1
  13. 2024PS-StyleGAN: Illustrative Portrait Sketching using Attention-Based Style Adaptationcited by 0
  14. 2025Breaking the Box: Enhancing Remote Sensing Image Segmentation with Freehand Sketchescited by 0
  15. 2025Doodle Your Keypoints: Sketch-Based Few-Shot Keypoint Detectioncited by 0
  16. 2026SketchXplain: Intuitive Visual Explanations of Image Classifiers with Sketchescited by 0