# Why Do Line Drawings Work? A Realism Hypothesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.06260 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06260/

## Key facts

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

## Built on by (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Learning to generate line drawings that convey geometry and semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12691/) (2022)
- [CLIPascene: Scene Sketching with Different Types and Levels of Abstraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17256/) (2022)
- [CLIPasso: Semantically-Aware Object Sketching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05822/) (2022)
- [Breathing Life Into Sketches Using Text-to-Video Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13608/) (2023)
- [Picture that Sketch: Photorealistic Image Generation from Abstract Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11162/) (2023)
- [It's All About Your Sketch: Democratising Sketch Control in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07234/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Sketch2Saliency: Learning to Detect Salient Objects from Human Drawings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11502/) (2023)
- [Doodle Your 3D: From Abstract Freehand Sketches to Precise 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04043/) (2023)
- [Neural Strokes: Stylized Line Drawing of 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03900/) (2021)
- [SketchINR: A First Look into Sketches as Implicit Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09344/) (2024)
- [Designing Perceptual Puzzles by Differentiating Probabilistic Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12301/) (2022)
- [DemoCaricature: Democratising Caricature Generation with a Rough Sketch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04364/) (2023)
- [Multi-Object Sketch Animation with Grouping and Motion Trajectory Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15535/) (2025)
- [LineArt: A Knowledge-guided Training-free High-quality Appearance Transfer for Design Drawing with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11519/) (2024)
- [What Sketch Explainability Really Means for Downstream Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09480/) (2024)
- [The Role of Edges in Line Drawing Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09376/) (2021)
- [Do Generalised Classifiers really work on Human Drawn Sketches?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03893/) (2024)
- [Recovering Dynamic 3D Sketches from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20321/) (2025)
- [Computational Scaffolding of Composition, Value, and Color for Disciplined Drawing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17268/) (2025)
- [StyLandGAN: A StyleGAN based Landscape Image Synthesis using Depth-map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06611/) (2022)
- [Towards Practicality of Sketch-Based Visual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15146/) (2022)
- [Creo: From One-Shot Image Generation to Progressive, Co-Creative Ideation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13956/) (2026)
- [PS-StyleGAN: Illustrative Portrait Sketching using Attention-Based Style Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00345/) (2024)
- [Breaking the Box: Enhancing Remote Sensing Image Segmentation with Freehand Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12191/) (2025)
- [Doodle Your Keypoints: Sketch-Based Few-Shot Keypoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07994/) (2025)
- [SketchXplain: Intuitive Visual Explanations of Image Classifiers with Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17646/) (2026)

## 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.