SketchINR: A First Look into Sketches as Implicit Neural Representations
Authors: Hmrishav Bandyopadhyay, Ayan Kumar Bhunia, Pinaki Nath Chowdhury, Aneeshan Sain, Tao Xiang, Timothy Hospedales, Yi-Zhe Song

We propose SketchINR to advance the representation of vector sketches with implicit neural models. A variable length vector sketch is compressed into a latent space of fixed dimension that implicitly encodes the underlying shape as a function of time and strokes. The learned function predicts the xy point coordinates in a sketch at each time and stroke. Despite its simplicity SketchINR outperforms existing representations at multiple tasks: (i) Encoding an entire sketch dataset into a fixed size latent vector SketchINR gives 60x and 10x data compression over raster and vector sketches respectively. (ii) SketchINR's auto-decoder provides a much higher-fidelity representation than other learned vector sketch representations and is uniquely able to scale to complex vector sketches such as FS-COCO. (iii) SketchINR supports parallelisation that can decode/render  100x faster than other learned vector representations such as SketchRNN. (iv) SketchINR for the first time emulates the human ability to reproduce a sketch with varying abstraction in terms of number and complexity of strokes. As a first look at implicit sketches SketchINR's compact high-fidelity representation will support future work in modelling long and complex sketches.